3 ms·

> And nothing built in to the manual really explained enough to do much besides some basic stuff involving printing characters to the screen, and some keyboard

> And nothing built in to the manual really explained enough to do much besides some basic stuff involving printing characters to the screen, and some keyboard input. If the manual had any kind of tutorial sufficient to make snake or even just a really bad version of asteroids or galaga or something I'd probably have never put down the keyboard. But instead, I kind of lost interest because I assumed I was missing something you needed to make graphical programs. This sounds a lot like myself as a kid in the around 1999/2000 after getting my parents' Performa tower as a hand-me-down. I'd become aware that it was possible to build one's own programs, but exactly how was extremely murky. I grabbed various development tools mentioned on the internet, but as you note tutorials were nonexistent and IDEs, consoles, etc may as well have been ancient tablets written in an archaic language. Finally I stumbled across REALBasic, I think maybe on a MacAddict shareware/demo disc, which was analogous to Visual Basic in the Windows world (though unlike VB, RB could compile binaries for both platforms). That was far more intuitive… just drag a button onto your window-canvas and double-click the button to edit its code. Examples were also much more common and easy to find on the internet and so before too long I was hitting the ceiling of what was possible in RB. That segued nicely into Cocoa development when OS X rolled around, which brought Project Builder and similar (but far more extensive) WYSIWYG UI builder with Interface Builder. That took a lot longer to become capable with, but led me to where I am today as a mobile dev.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Sounds very much like my experience, except that I was using Delphi. Non-existent documentation (complicated by me not speaking English at the time), no friends or relatives using computers for anything other than office documents (and very few having or using them at all), no access to the internet, and a friendly neighborhood software store that sold "pirated" copies of Delphi 7 for something like $2. That was an excellent environment to start precisely for reasons you described: double click on any element created an event handler for its "main event", and you could take it from there. But: Object Pascal/Delphi is a quite powerful language and you can write really complicated stuff with it, compiled into a relatively small statically linked executable that worked just about everywhere without the need to install anything. (300-400 KB binaries seemed large at the time, little I knew what awaited us 20 years down the line.) The need to dig and learn everything yourself definitely had some impact and provided some lower level knowledge of things many newer developers don't seem to know or care about, but I very much prefer what we have today where you're not expected to learn to read what looks like ancient Egyptian from scratch to write a basic calculator. Good riddance to those times.
- twic 3y ago
  Sounds like the opposite of my experience with Java in 1996. I had some great thick book on it (as was the style at the time), and after chapters on language basics, streams, collections, etc, it quickly got on to GUI programming with AWT. AWT is pretty horrible in many ways, but it did make it very easy for a teenage novice to put up a window with some buttons in it, and start drawing lines and text. I immediately started working on an ambitious space battle game. I got to the point where you could click to set waypoints for a ship, and it would try to fly a course through them, using Newtonian physics, but the navigation was incredibly naive, and always just accelerated towards the next waypoint, so eventually the ship was going so fast it crossed over the waypoint in a single time step, and would turn round and come back to it, inevitably missing is again, and so basically going into perpetual powered orbit around it. I then abandoned the project.
pharmakom 3y ago
REAL Basic was actually an amazing program. Easily throw together a cross platform GUI and one click to create a self contained executable. Remarkable that we struggle with this in Modern stacks.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

Sounds very much like my experience, except that I was using Delphi. Non-existent documentation (complicated by me not speaking English at the time), no friends or relatives using computers for anything other than office documents (and very few having or using them at all), no access to the internet, and a friendly neighborhood software store that sold "pirated" copies of Delphi 7 for something like $2. That was an excellent environment to start precisely for reasons you described: double click on any element created an event handler for its "main event", and you could take it from there. But: Object Pascal/Delphi is a quite powerful language and you can write really complicated stuff with it, compiled into a relatively small statically linked executable that worked just about everywhere without the need to install anything. (300-400 KB binaries seemed large at the time, little I knew what awaited us 20 years down the line.) The need to dig and learn everything yourself definitely had some impact and provided some lower level knowledge of things many newer developers don't seem to know or care about, but I very much prefer what we have today where you're not expected to learn to read what looks like ancient Egyptian from scratch to write a basic calculator. Good riddance to those times.

twic 3y ago
Sounds like the opposite of my experience with Java in 1996. I had some great thick book on it (as was the style at the time), and after chapters on language basics, streams, collections, etc, it quickly got on to GUI programming with AWT. AWT is pretty horrible in many ways, but it did make it very easy for a teenage novice to put up a window with some buttons in it, and start drawing lines and text. I immediately started working on an ambitious space battle game. I got to the point where you could click to set waypoints for a ship, and it would try to fly a course through them, using Newtonian physics, but the navigation was incredibly naive, and always just accelerated towards the next waypoint, so eventually the ship was going so fast it crossed over the waypoint in a single time step, and would turn round and come back to it, inevitably missing is again, and so basically going into perpetual powered orbit around it. I then abandoned the project.

pharmakom 3y ago

REAL Basic was actually an amazing program. Easily throw together a cross platform GUI and one click to create a self contained executable. Remarkable that we struggle with this in Modern stacks.