Hacker News Reader

Comment by mceachen | Hacker News Reader

> Sorry for calling you old.

Whippersnappers these days are so gosh darn polite.

Writing C code on a SPARCstation and Green Hills compiler/debugger as an undergrad in 1989, I got used to step-forward, and step-back, in a GUI environment.

I had no idea that I'd never see that magic "step-back" button again, in C, C++, MFC, Java, Scala, or a litany of scripting languages and development environments.

Other people have touched on it, but you could be proficient in literally all the programming languages back then. There were less than 20. The later explosion of languages and techniques in common use can be overwhelming, but has stretched the spectrum available to our craft.

View on HN

Oh, also: personal computers in the 80s booted into a BASIC prompt. It was a terrible language to cut your teeth on, but it was there, right in front of you, and there were magazines and books (at the library and local book store, on dead trees), that taught fun things (like how to animate sprites, or set half your screen to graphics mode, or how to poke the midi controller into croaking out something beepy).

Or "poke" into the interpreter's ram region to do crazy things like shifting the string store to overlay the graphics ram and clearing the screen faster than any other technique by creating new blank strings and then poke the original values you peek'd out of it back.

Or spending afternoons typing in some game that was printed on the back of a magazine in assembly, and then poke 32768 and poof, game. Magic when you're 9 years old.

SYS 32768, not POKE 32768

As an aside, reading and understanding the entire disassembled "kernal" and BASIC rom for the C-64. All of it taking up less space than just about anything on just about any site nowadays - in that respect we took a wrong turn somewhere IMnsHO. Yes, storage is cheap and bandwidth abundant but the same is true for clean water yet nobody drinks 50 litres of the stuff per day 'just because it is cheap and abundant'...

Oh, also: I made fun of my friend who got a 1200 baud modem.

I mean, obviously, why do you need more than 300? You can't read text faster than 300 baud.

Oh the day I realized there was more interesting stuff appearing on fidonet faster than I could ever read. That I could read all day and still get further behind...

Now I'm now so sure... sometimes I think the rate of interesting new stuff to _read_ is slowing down again and I may yet catch up again.

I got started with programming as a teen in the 00’s. Tried to start with C++, but couldn’t make any sense of it. But then I tried BASIC running on a micro-controller doing simple stuff like blinking an LED. I think it was the perfect intro to programming—no OS to care about, simple language running on bare hardware running at 20MHz / 2KiB RAM. Sure it’s not a great language to actually do stuff in. But for learning the basics, it’s perfect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com