Comment by metiscus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metiscus | Hacker News Reader

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>Growing up, I certainly would have loved having near infinite amounts of programming help available for free, instead of trying to decipher something from a 50-times photocopied manual.

Would you be as good of a programmer today if that was true? I remember spending an entire week trying to figure out how strings worked in QBASIC, when I was in 5th grade. There was no internet and I only had the Apple IIGS Basic manual to work with. I tried and tried and tried and eventually figured out that it had something to do with those $ symbols. Eventually I got the hang of it. I guess the point is, that challenge and struggle with simple things helped me develop the attitude to overcome truly difficult things later. Maybe this is more just memories of childhood than anything..

Fair point. Though who knows, it's hard/impossible to say. For some individuals, it might have been positive, for others, perhaps negative. Overall however, I would not say that today's programmers are of worse quality, on average. (It's hard to compare however, as clearly we have a 10/20/30 year experience gap over them.)

It ebbs and flows. There was a low point in the late nineties and early 2000's:

* Windows 95 removed all thought of the user as a programmer, killing things like QBasic.

* Apple was doing likewise, even killing Hypercard.

* The web wasn't in its prime yet, limited to HTML 2.0 and 3.2, and really lousy JavaScript.

* Even electronics was tough, since DIP parts were being replaced with SMT, and the service manual was starting to become a relic, but things like Arduino and RPi didn't exist yet, and making PCBs was $$$$$.

* Shop classes were on the decline in schools, but makerspaces weren't in yet.

I feel bad for kids growing up then. Short of installing a Linux distribution, kids were left out in the cold for being anything other than consumers of technology.

There was really a golden age in the eighties and early nineties, and we seem to be in another golden age right now.

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