Hacker News Reader

Comment by jason_slack | Hacker News Reader

I loved playing this game.....and one of the games that made me lean towards a career in programming.

Spending my nights and weekend (as a high school student in 1992-1996) in my grandparents basement, other kids out playing, I learned pascal, c++, mpw on a Mac SE30, then an LC III.

Fun Fact: I worked an entire Summer to save the $400 that was needed for Metrowerks Codewarrior. To find out that I could have gotten it for $99 academic pricing. To bad I did not know it existed. Mac Mall magazine never mentioned academic pricing! I still have this box set and can't bring myself to throw it out.

View on HN

It was my birthday present when I was 11, after drooling over it in the MacMall catalog for months and begging my parents every time I thought I could risk it... CodeWarrior was like the Christmas Story kid's BB Gun for me. I think they must have found the academic discount, there's no way they could have afforded the $400.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I just knew I needed a good "compiler" to make "programs". Apple's IDE (MPW?) was really horrendous by comparison - I was unable to get anywhere with it.

I also literally learned how to write C in CodeWarrior. I wish I could find the CodeWarrior people and tell them how influential it was.

I have a picture from when I was 11 standing outside of Borland HQ with my boxed copy of Turbo Pascal somewhere... I feel your joy.

Pretty sure they know. It's not exaggerating (much) to say that CodeWarrior is the primary reason Mac developers stayed with the platform during the 68K to PowerPC transition. The pre-2.0 CodeWarrior IDE was the simplest and fastest way to produce Mac software in the mid-nineties.

I still talk with 2 members of the Codewarrior team periodically! Met them in the 90's on the usegroups.

Awesome! If you could pass this their way that'd be so neat. :)

I had a similar experience -- my buddy and I moved on from hypercard to "real" programming when he picked up a codewarrior compiler at a garage sale.

I remember sitting there trying to decide if we should try to figure out this weird C stuff or Pascal first. We ended up going with C. Probably a good choice, in retrospect.

It's hard to tell how much of it's "first love" nostalgia, but I remember codewarrior as being very simple, very fast, and very well designed.

Visual Studio and autotools were both quite a shock. (I still can't believe people use the autotools shit-chain. Ungodly terrible.)

CodeWarrior remains my favorite IDE of all time. A diamond in the rough.

It wasn't perfect, but man I loved using it so much more than anything else. It had some rough edges, but I knew how to work them. I remember fighting with Visual Studio around the same time. Actually, for years, I used CodeWarrior on Windows and cross debugged from my Mac because it was easier than trying to use Visual Studio.

I remember spending $350 for Borland C++, looking back its so strange to pay for compilers

Thank the UNIX vendors.

No one cared about GNU until they started selling the SDKs

CodeWarrior T-shirts were legendarily cool

https://www.google.com/search?q=metrowerks+codewarrior+t-shi...

I had a Mac IIsi and I loved doing 3D modeling. Stratavision 3d retailed for $600, but then I was overjoyed to learn that you can get one for $199 as a student! I was probably their first middle school student customer.

I bought Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and Turbo C++ for Windows 1.0 around 1993.

Those boxes still look like new and occasionally I do a trip down memory lane skimming through the manuals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com