4 ms·

I'm probably about to date myself, but here goes. When I started programming, there was no Google. There wasn't a search engine yet. There were BBS's (which wer

I'm probably about to date myself, but here goes. When I started programming, there was no Google. There wasn't a search engine yet. There were BBS's (which were slow), books (which were expensive), and magazines (which were infrequent). More junior programmers often ask, "Did you look things up? How did you search for things without Google? It must have been so hard!" Well, from my perspective, it was! It was a horrible pain! Sometimes you'd spend way too much time debugging a simple error or looking up in some magazine that you are sure you read somewhere a statement that you are pretty sure would help you out in this particular scenario. Oh, it was tedious. On the up side, at the time I didn't use nearly as many complex technologies as I use today. Quite literally today I have written in Java, a bit of Ruby, a bit of Perl, and some bash. If we expand out to this week we can add in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL. Back when I started I used Basic for long stints, or C for long stints, and that was it! Google (or in my case DuckDuckGo), StackOverflow, and the like are AMAZING. I am grateful every time I get to use one of them to help me quickly solve a problem and move on to the exciting part, which for me is making working software.

Swizec 11y ago
I'm only 27 and I too started coding before there was Google. Dial-up was barely becoming a thing in my country. This was around 1995/1996. I got my first internet connection at home in 2001 (ADSL). Before that I would go to the library to use their internet. But it was a huge novelty and I had no idea how to use it to help myself or how to find a BBS or anything. I knew how to IRC, but I didn't know there were other programmers there. Those 5 years were a strange strange time. I would spend my days between the text editor and its built-in help files. This was Turbo Pascal. It was great, I could look up the function signature of anything in the language and some description of what it does. Once a week I would ask my mentor about things. The rest was tinkering. And, honestly, it was amazing. I was having shitloads of fun just playing around with different functions, coming up with my own ideas on how to use them, figuring things out just by trying them and seeing what works better instead of immediately resorting to the internet and doing research like I do now. Sure, I'm more productive now, but I'm having a lot less fun.
whatever_dude 11y ago
Yeah. I didn't use Google (or any other search engine) when I started. For some I had an electronic reference with some syntax. But you know what I really used? The printed reference, either a manual for a language or a printed copy of it if the original was in electronic form. I'd have this stack of 200 pages of printed paper.. Nowadays I'm kind of scared of how much I rely on Google and StackOverflow, and fear I'm being too reliant on other people's knowledge, but you know what - there was an alternative, and it sucked.
- andygates 11y ago
  Scared, but also delighted, because paper manuals and futzing around with syntax was a joyless chore.
robotkilla 11y ago
I didn't have internet access when I was a kid so I used the included qbasic documentation and books from the library that had example code (in the form of atari-style video games) when i taught myself to program.
berntb 11y ago
For me, searching Usenet groups came before Google. There was a transfer period of a few years, when your behavior changed when you had a problem. In the beginning I began with thinking/testing. If I still couldn't solve my problem, I read manuals/books/papers for edge cases/esoterics. Finally I searched/asked. A year later I thought, then searched -- and finally I read. And after another year I searched before thinking! This is where we still are now. (This was a few years before and up to the Millennium, for me.) I heard that chemists have a saying -- "with a few dedicated weeks of hard work in the lab, you can save hours in the library!" Thank you Google, et al. (And yes I'm Hellbanned.)
thoman23 11y ago
Yes, I remember the days of the giant Java reference book being shared among cubicle-mates. The other thing to keep in mind is that much more of the code we relied upon back then was closed source. Anyone remember the bad old days of decompiling Weblogic to track down what was going on with some strange bug under the hood?
FrankenPC 11y ago
There was Compuserve dialup. Expensive and slow as molasses.
- BatFastard 11y ago
  Compuserve was great for its time. It allowed you to connect to other developers. I have never been more active on forums then I was on the compuserve forums. It WAS the place for developers.
nothis 11y ago
Having grown up with google, I still sometimes look at code (that I just got to work after an exhausting search on Stackoverflow) and think, "man, future generations of coders must figure out something more practical" and I'll probably get to tell them, "yep, that's how tedious it was" stories as well. What strikes me the most is how often code repeats, how often mistakes repeat. You can google a quite specific problem and more or less always find a result, likely a Stackoverflow article with tens of thousands of views. While it's great that we now have a collective knowledge tool to fight this, it also illustrates how much programming is still running in circles. We take pride in expertise and skill, but how much of this is memorizing workarounds and exotic quirks that shouldn't even be necessary? What will be the next google? The next Stackoverflow? I doubt it will literally just be a better version of either. It will probably be better IDEs and debuggers. Heck, I doubt we'll continue to type as much as we do...
- logicallee 11y ago
  >I still sometimes look at code [...] and think, generations of coders must figure out something more practical Imagine if package management happened this way: say you want to update your version of, oh I don't know, wget. First you Google "wget" and your operating system (analogy for your programming language). Then you open... not the wget page. There is none. You open stack overflow tabs. Not just one either. You look through them, i.e. the answers, the comments about the answers. Finally you find one that people report actually works, you copy a massive block of code into a text file. You make some changes, as it isn't really complete. You save it. You compile it. And, if it worked, there's the latest version of wget, and you move on. Sound reasonable? Apparently it is for programming languages.
  - trcollinson 11y ago
    I am not sure that your analogy quite holds. Though maybe I am reading into it incorrectly. When I turn to Google or Stackoverflow the problem isn't something that could or should be solved by existing code or documentation. It's often more nebulous. I am sure there are those who strictly code by copying and pasting from StackOverflow but I would imagine in the long run they either get better at coding or they fail miserable. For me and most of the people I know who look things up it's more like, "I am working on this piece of code which is giving an error, and I have stared at it for a bit and I don't see what is wrong. I wonder if others have seen this problem before. I need a bit of inspiration to get me through it." It's almost like paired programming. It's not so much that I am looking for an answer, I am looking for a toe hold in order to push myself just a little higher on a cliff. Inspiration from others experiences helps me to move along quicker. I got this in the past from BBS's, books, and magazines. But now the internet has made that process quite a bit faster and less expensive. And that seems reasonable to me.
tlarkworthy 11y ago
The help in programs used to be fairly comprehensive though. I don't think I have used one for years.
ivanhoe 11y ago
We had Usenet news groups back then, it was the StackOverflow of the 90s :)
- jheriko 11y ago
  not if you had no internet. :) i had help files and terrible books. :P
ibejoeb 11y ago
Larger (regional) public libraries were where I'd be able to find a pretty good variety of books about computing. I'd pick them up regardless of subject, e.g., the APL book despite having no access to APL-capable machines, or a text on expert systems despite having no AI fundamentals. It was fun and a little mysterious, and I did a lot of on-paper coding. It was also easy to get a good C programming book for more practical stuff. Sometimes I'd scour BBSs for a little info, mostly about BBS programming in pascal. It was usually faster to go to the library, though, since the Fidonet transfers were irregular and usually a day between. I'm not sure if having Google, or even a more developed internet, would have been better. I spent a lot of time "inventing" things, which, I think, really ingrained the basics into my head. It was, in a way, disappointing to learn later that some data structure was actually old and well researched by people with 20 years on me. But those are the ones that will always stick with me.
jheriko 11y ago
if you were a late comer to those days it was amazingly good. the help file from qbasic got me started down a path that didn't end, and getting a visual basic with msdn on cd was even better... it makes me sad when i see the msdn today, and even more so the apple and google docs which are absolutely terrible, bordering on useless in many cases. don't even mention linux development which still seems to be stuck in 1970s mentalities when it comes to usability.
analog31 11y ago
When I learned programming, it was pretty common to get from a senior programmer, some huge source listing, and use it as a reference. When I got my first real computer, I got Turbo Pascal, and its manual was excellent. Also (not atypical in the day) the language and its libraries replicated the essential functionality of the system, so the language was the system. It was not unrealistic that I memorized TP in its entirety after a couple of years. Today, I think the challenge is that we are programming much more complex systems, and the functionality we need is not self contained, but is pulled together from scattered bits and pieces. Much as I love the Python ecosystem, it must seem like an enormous squirming mass to someone who is accustomed to working within a package such as Matlab or Excel.
monksy 11y ago
Lets not forget about the MSDN subscription that came via CDs.

Swizec 11y ago

I'm only 27 and I too started coding before there was Google. Dial-up was barely becoming a thing in my country. This was around 1995/1996. I got my first internet connection at home in 2001 (ADSL). Before that I would go to the library to use their internet. But it was a huge novelty and I had no idea how to use it to help myself or how to find a BBS or anything. I knew how to IRC, but I didn't know there were other programmers there. Those 5 years were a strange strange time. I would spend my days between the text editor and its built-in help files. This was Turbo Pascal. It was great, I could look up the function signature of anything in the language and some description of what it does. Once a week I would ask my mentor about things. The rest was tinkering. And, honestly, it was amazing. I was having shitloads of fun just playing around with different functions, coming up with my own ideas on how to use them, figuring things out just by trying them and seeing what works better instead of immediately resorting to the internet and doing research like I do now. Sure, I'm more productive now, but I'm having a lot less fun.

whatever_dude 11y ago

Yeah. I didn't use Google (or any other search engine) when I started. For some I had an electronic reference with some syntax. But you know what I really used? The printed reference, either a manual for a language or a printed copy of it if the original was in electronic form. I'd have this stack of 200 pages of printed paper.. Nowadays I'm kind of scared of how much I rely on Google and StackOverflow, and fear I'm being too reliant on other people's knowledge, but you know what - there was an alternative, and it sucked.

andygates 11y ago
Scared, but also delighted, because paper manuals and futzing around with syntax was a joyless chore.

robotkilla 11y ago

I didn't have internet access when I was a kid so I used the included qbasic documentation and books from the library that had example code (in the form of atari-style video games) when i taught myself to program.

berntb 11y ago

For me, searching Usenet groups came before Google. There was a transfer period of a few years, when your behavior changed when you had a problem. In the beginning I began with thinking/testing. If I still couldn't solve my problem, I read manuals/books/papers for edge cases/esoterics. Finally I searched/asked. A year later I thought, then searched -- and finally I read. And after another year I searched before thinking! This is where we still are now. (This was a few years before and up to the Millennium, for me.) I heard that chemists have a saying -- "with a few dedicated weeks of hard work in the lab, you can save hours in the library!" Thank you Google, et al. (And yes I'm Hellbanned.)

thoman23 11y ago

Yes, I remember the days of the giant Java reference book being shared among cubicle-mates. The other thing to keep in mind is that much more of the code we relied upon back then was closed source. Anyone remember the bad old days of decompiling Weblogic to track down what was going on with some strange bug under the hood?

FrankenPC 11y ago

There was Compuserve dialup. Expensive and slow as molasses.

BatFastard 11y ago
Compuserve was great for its time. It allowed you to connect to other developers. I have never been more active on forums then I was on the compuserve forums. It WAS the place for developers.

nothis 11y ago

Having grown up with google, I still sometimes look at code (that I just got to work after an exhausting search on Stackoverflow) and think, "man, future generations of coders must figure out something more practical" and I'll probably get to tell them, "yep, that's how tedious it was" stories as well. What strikes me the most is how often code repeats, how often mistakes repeat. You can google a quite specific problem and more or less always find a result, likely a Stackoverflow article with tens of thousands of views. While it's great that we now have a collective knowledge tool to fight this, it also illustrates how much programming is still running in circles. We take pride in expertise and skill, but how much of this is memorizing workarounds and exotic quirks that shouldn't even be necessary? What will be the next google? The next Stackoverflow? I doubt it will literally just be a better version of either. It will probably be better IDEs and debuggers. Heck, I doubt we'll continue to type as much as we do...

logicallee 11y ago
>I still sometimes look at code [...] and think, generations of coders must figure out something more practical Imagine if package management happened this way: say you want to update your version of, oh I don't know, wget. First you Google "wget" and your operating system (analogy for your programming language). Then you open... not the wget page. There is none. You open stack overflow tabs. Not just one either. You look through them, i.e. the answers, the comments about the answers. Finally you find one that people report actually works, you copy a massive block of code into a text file. You make some changes, as it isn't really complete. You save it. You compile it. And, if it worked, there's the latest version of wget, and you move on. Sound reasonable? Apparently it is for programming languages.
- trcollinson 11y ago
  I am not sure that your analogy quite holds. Though maybe I am reading into it incorrectly. When I turn to Google or Stackoverflow the problem isn't something that could or should be solved by existing code or documentation. It's often more nebulous. I am sure there are those who strictly code by copying and pasting from StackOverflow but I would imagine in the long run they either get better at coding or they fail miserable. For me and most of the people I know who look things up it's more like, "I am working on this piece of code which is giving an error, and I have stared at it for a bit and I don't see what is wrong. I wonder if others have seen this problem before. I need a bit of inspiration to get me through it." It's almost like paired programming. It's not so much that I am looking for an answer, I am looking for a toe hold in order to push myself just a little higher on a cliff. Inspiration from others experiences helps me to move along quicker. I got this in the past from BBS's, books, and magazines. But now the internet has made that process quite a bit faster and less expensive. And that seems reasonable to me.

tlarkworthy 11y ago

The help in programs used to be fairly comprehensive though. I don't think I have used one for years.

ivanhoe 11y ago

We had Usenet news groups back then, it was the StackOverflow of the 90s :)

jheriko 11y ago
not if you had no internet. :) i had help files and terrible books. :P

ibejoeb 11y ago

Larger (regional) public libraries were where I'd be able to find a pretty good variety of books about computing. I'd pick them up regardless of subject, e.g., the APL book despite having no access to APL-capable machines, or a text on expert systems despite having no AI fundamentals. It was fun and a little mysterious, and I did a lot of on-paper coding. It was also easy to get a good C programming book for more practical stuff. Sometimes I'd scour BBSs for a little info, mostly about BBS programming in pascal. It was usually faster to go to the library, though, since the Fidonet transfers were irregular and usually a day between. I'm not sure if having Google, or even a more developed internet, would have been better. I spent a lot of time "inventing" things, which, I think, really ingrained the basics into my head. It was, in a way, disappointing to learn later that some data structure was actually old and well researched by people with 20 years on me. But those are the ones that will always stick with me.

jheriko 11y ago

if you were a late comer to those days it was amazingly good. the help file from qbasic got me started down a path that didn't end, and getting a visual basic with msdn on cd was even better... it makes me sad when i see the msdn today, and even more so the apple and google docs which are absolutely terrible, bordering on useless in many cases. don't even mention linux development which still seems to be stuck in 1970s mentalities when it comes to usability.

analog31 11y ago

When I learned programming, it was pretty common to get from a senior programmer, some huge source listing, and use it as a reference. When I got my first real computer, I got Turbo Pascal, and its manual was excellent. Also (not atypical in the day) the language and its libraries replicated the essential functionality of the system, so the language was the system. It was not unrealistic that I memorized TP in its entirety after a couple of years. Today, I think the challenge is that we are programming much more complex systems, and the functionality we need is not self contained, but is pulled together from scattered bits and pieces. Much as I love the Python ecosystem, it must seem like an enormous squirming mass to someone who is accustomed to working within a package such as Matlab or Excel.

monksy 11y ago

Lets not forget about the MSDN subscription that came via CDs.