Learning 80’s style programming today
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Further edit: It occurs to me I have a relevant anecdote. I was never able to get into assembler on the Commodore 64, having gotten as far as I really could with Basic. I actually had an assembler, but no documentation. I had no ability to get documentation, no idea where to find it, nobody to even ask, hardly any clue that I should be asking. I managed to wedge my computer a few times just typing some vaguely assemblish stuff into it, but no more. Today, www.google.com -> "Commodore 64 assembly" (no quotes) yields http://www.c64.ch/programming/ as the first hit.
Yeah, it's gotten a lot easier.
Very much almost exclusively my knowledge of programming comes from reading books and 'pootling' around (and I started in 2000).
I think it's more a matter of where you live than what age you live in.
In the early 2000s you only read books and experimented and didn't use the Internet for help or as a reference at all? That would strike me as unusual, though not far fetched.
My point was merely that the Web is an amazing resource for new developers now that we didn't have in the 80s. (Or Usenet - in the 90s. I got access to the net in 1995 and my programming abilities shot through the roof within a few years merely by conversing on newsgroups.)
"Where you live" is precisely the thing that matters least now. As long as you have access to the Internet, you're only seconds away from anybody in the world.
The single largest hurdle for learning on your own is knowing the right questions to ask and how and where to ask them. Sites like HN and SO are great but it's a matter of finding them (and neither SO nor HN have existed for very long).
(and btw I didn't downmod you)
That's an interesting point, though pre 2001-ish I'd suggest this was easier. Usenet was the obvious destination. Groups like comp.lang.c, comp.lang.basic.misc and rec.game.design were popular and easy to find. Nowadays, there are 1001 different sites (many with poor traffic) for every topic imaginable.
Sadly, Usenet seemed to fall on its ass and be usurped by the Web somewhere between 2000 and 2003. A shame, that.
I'll consolidate our discussion into this one thread, in saying that I did use the internet to learn but I used it rather poorly. My Google-fu was rather terrible when I was younger. Tackling a large subject like programming was not easy for me when I basically had no footholds or easy ways to enter that body of knowledge.
I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to learn how to program without the internet though I think that as we build more powerful consumer-grade computing systems, the hurdles involved in getting into programming get higher and become more numerous.
Personally, the hard part was getting good documentation, though my parents' 286 came with a manual on GW-BASIC, which was included. I also managed to procure some BASIC documentation at a garage sale.
Basically impossible to learn computer science, though, except by trial and error. I just did things ad hoc. Experience teaches you how not to do things, but slowly.
This is a good point. I'd been coding for over ten years before I was even introduced to the (actually rather important) concept of algorithmic complexity! If I'd taken CS in university, that wouldn't have been the case. Now, though, it's possible for even novices to be introduced to these topics online (depending on who they're talking to).
I think one of the biggest reasons for this is the ease of IO, and the type of communities that have formed around its use, like Newgrounds.
I agree, Flash is a decent choice for the same reasons BASIC was awesome in the 80s - kids love to make noises and draw/animate graphics. Javascript is catching up on the graphics front, but sound is sadly still just not there.
Partial list:
* Games
* Store-front advertising display (flashing and animated)
* Home Babysitter -- teaches kids the alphabet
* business spreadsheet
* sports data (subscription service on compuserve)
* stock quotes (subscription service on compuserve)
Granted, I mostly just played games and hacked programs, but I had a word processor and got a copy of GEOS (GUI windowing environment)
They do, it's called Small Basic.
Although this was written in 2006, before Small Basic existed.
I think if someone asked me how to get started hacking around, I'd suggest HTML/Javascript or Processing. They both have the advantage of being very easy to deploy the output if you want (for sharing). They also have progressive enhancement (meaning you can start knowing only a few simple things and learn more as you need it)