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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

The whole sentiment of this article just comes off a little whiny to me. Nowadays there is so much more information available for learning how to code and set up your dev environment. There are literally coding books for kids at book stores. And StackOverflow!

When I was younger, one had to search high and low on the net trying to find help using shitty dial-up service. Then, you'd end up in some IRC channel asking for help and someone simply says 'RTFM!'

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If this is the case, it is because people were conscious that there was in issue in how computer turned into more and more as an appliance mean to consume information [1] (The C64 had a full programming manual delivered with it, booted directly to an interpreter and even had schematic of the machine reportedly!) and tried to counter it.

Even then despite all the amazing ressource available, there is a risk of digital divide between people having access to tutor that can show the good ressource (because there is a lot of bad ressource!) and isolated people that are stuck with glorified engagement platform.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/

The schematic wasn't in the C64 User Guide delivered with the machine, but it was in an additional Commodore publication "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide". The PRG was essential if you wanted to do anything more than the most basic BASIC contained in the UG.

See p.514- for the schematic https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref/page/n513/mod...

Thanks I was not sure if the PRG was delivered with the C64.

> Then, you'd end up in some IRC channel asking for help and someone simply says 'RTFM!'

I had such a delightful retro experience the other day! I had spent days fighting a segfault in a widely used, mature library. Naturally, me being new to the library, and knowing that it's mature and widely used, I assumed I was doing something wrong. No mention of the problem online. Crickets in my StackOverflow question for days. In the end, my last ditch effort was to find some of the devlopers on IRC (I hadn't used it for a decade). I was ready for the "RTFM!!!" telling off of my childhood.

But no. People were super helpful. Helped me debug and explain what the library was doing. Turns out it was a bug in a little-used corner of the library afterall! It had lingered there unreported for 3 years. 10/10, would IRC again!

Your good experience was probably due to "10/10 would help someone who did their own homework first again!"

This is the nature of monotonic improvement. Just because things were substantially worse back in your day doesn't mean those darn kids don't have good reason to complain about the pain points of of today in an effort to make things substantially better tomorrow.

I'm happy to be that old guy who learned programming with magazine articles(and a pirated copy of turbo Pascal. You really appreciated that hypertext help.)

I'm impressed you did, I tried to learn the same way when I was younger, (albeit with pirated Borland C++) but never made any headway. Admittedly the library books I had access to were obsolete, and no-one in my rural area of a small country carried decent magazines on the subject.

That said, they did carry BBS magazines which led me eventually into the nascent WWW over the 14.4K modem I saved all my pocket money to buy.

Then I finally managed to access the resources to learn. God bless mailing lists.

I also got stuck on C++. It was (and remains) such a disproportionate pain to compile, which was just too high a hurdle in the days before you could search for your cryptic build errors on the internet.

I was able to fool around with BASIC easily enough, with entire programs provided in magazines like Byte.

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