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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

> If only I had had

I never understood how the English, and sometimes the Dutch, seemed in general (looking at their results) to be able to learn many times faster than amateurs in other territories. Sometimes with borrowed machines! "They gave me this, and after some weeks I had my first videogame working". I guess/ed it may have been a matter of human network - of being able to find knowledgeable people in the neighborhood to learn and exchange -, but it seems to have been often a solitary effort. It seems in a way like a talent, like that of the Scots for inventions, but there have to be keys that made kids talented coders through their own natural grit.

Others have had difficulties in finding documentation alone, not to mention competent peers.

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I wonder if the presence of other machines in the market made things like assemblers more well known in the UK.

i.e. BBC Micros came with an assembler so it's the kind of thing BBC users would tell CPC464 users about and they would then buy third party.

Why did the BBC Micro have an assembler? Well the people made it started out in a university setting with access to all sorts of things that they wanted on their small computers.

E.g. BBC Micros had networking before most other 8-bit machines simply because the original developers had used it in a research lab.

In other markets you might just be working on your own and so wouldn't know about things like networking because you wouldn't have an immediate need for it.

To quote William Gibson, the future is here already it's just poorly diffused.

It was a short hop from picking up Castle of the Winds II at a dollar store to finding out about resource editors and win32 when I wanted to edit the images. The game itself was from 1993, but this was in the late 90s/early 2000s when you could Google stuff like this and land on programming forums. And likely a post from someone else who wanted to do the same thing.

I still had to know about it. If I'd never found Rick Saada's experiment in win32 packaged as a game for a dollar, would I know about any of this? I wonder if the growing availability of the internet has closed the gap any.

Not technically "win32", Saada wrote it to experiment with the new-at-the-time Windows 3.0 API (still 16 bit) while at Microsoft.

It's now in the public domain and should run under Wine on Linux, as well as 32 bit versions of Windows:

http://lkbm.ecritters.biz/cotw/download.html

I don't know why I remembered it as win32 from when he wrote about it. Anyway. I remember downloading a save editor from AOL's software center, so the stuff on that page brings back memories. I had a broken 10+ MB save from trying to get every item and explore every block in every dungeon. I'd pile stuff up by category in the middle of town.

I think it is also because of the game publishing industry.

I made a Tetris clone in Pascal, running in a 286 machine with 1 MB of RAM. It took me about a week of coding, and it ran as a single segment program, so it was limited to 64Kb of memory.

For me, this was the moment I learn about for loops. The program was a big collection of for loops.

I could have made some original game, but being Colombian, living in Bogotá, no one would have bought it. Everything we had was pirated, so there was no incentive to actually publish anything.

Speaking as a Brit. I don't think we have the capacity to learn many times faster.

I suppose there is something in our culture. A lot of inventions and science has come out of the UK.

There's also an (I assume) cultural phenomenon of tinkering in the garden shed.

I suppose there's the Protestant work ethic, the ethic of self improvement, a general acceptance and perhaps celebration of odd balls and tinkerers.

It the field of computing, it probably helps that we speak the same language (ISH) as the us, where a lot of this tech came from, but didn't have the money to just buy solutions.

But I don't really have any experience of other cultures in this context to say whether these things are unique.

>It the field of computing, it probably helps that we speak the same language

Then again, I think working through untranslated English material for my computer hobby helped me gain language proficiency more quickly than many peers.

My first word in English had most probably been 'ready' ;)

True. But if I'm reading z80 documentation, I'm going to be able to read it more easily. Plus I don't have to be also willing to learn a second language.

Of course in the end you have computing skills and a second language.

Slightly off topic question though. Are programming constructs based around or influenced English making it easier to learn as an anglophone?

Would (true)if be more common, or do{}while(true) be more common if English weren't the Lingua Franca?

I know you could find examples of these in many languages, but they aren't 'standard'

I have wondered about that. Every time a new language or framework attempts or claims to be more natural, I think "for who?"

> a general acceptance and perhaps celebration of odd balls and tinkerers

Paradise! (No, really, that is respectful and intelligent - if in general people can perceive that "the guy has something", that is already a big social asset.)

> other cultures

Other cultures may be quite diffident and promoting different "values" - in the streets you will more often find "socialites". At the extreme, a Siberian once told me: "They would go and beat up the different. «You are different», they would say, and beat you up".

Well I don't want to over egg our acceptance of 'different', there are certainly differences that aren't accepted, and certainly weren't in the past.

For me, as a kid back then it was the magazines. I would wait all month and then devour the latest Felix Denis publication end to end. The editors of these magazines could be considered the orchestrators of the UK 8 bit scene. Manuals were out of my financial reach.

>I never understood how the English, and sometimes the Dutch, seemed in general to be able to learn many times faster than amateurs in other territories.

I don't think that's the case, I think it's that the achievements form the English and the Dutch are shared on the English speaking internet so it's more easily to run into them VS for example, the German speaking hackers who, at least in the past, only shared their work on the German speaking internet instead, so their achievements are less likely to get international visibility.

It's the same with other cultures that have a huge population/market share. If you'd venture on the Russian speaking part of the internet, you'll find a gold mine of hacks, cracks, reverse engineering, and crazy software that flies under the radar.

> internet

We are talking about the scene in the early '80s.

Products were sold in shops and via mail and were advertised on magazines. Remote networking was on Bulletin Board Systems - and with limited diffusion. The hacker coding his¹ product probably did not easily have those things around.

¹(A 'his' that calls for a pluralized 'her', out of respect to a group that created a closed-doors women-only community in Ireland and produced "women-only" themed adventure games: they were in a way similar to a sect but sold their own software as part of the funding - I cannot remember names right now. I believe there exists a photo of a group of coders with two ladies dressed in Victorian costumes (which apparently were the uniform in said community), after a social gathering. This gives an idea of what could contribute to the scene. Edit: found: it was the "Silver Sisterhood", in County Donegal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Sisterhood )

Replace the word internet with various paper based publications and my argument still stands.

Sure, but check the distribution of actual products and you go back to the image I drew.

I think it was because in the 80's the US was wealthier and systems with disk drives were a lot more common.

People would swap games on disk, and there was less pressure to learn how the underlying system works.

Having a disk drive also enables more complex, larger games, which would be harder to produce as a lone programmer.

Contrast this with the UK - we had much less money, it was common to type games in from magazines, which is how a lot of us learned programming.

We mostly had to make do with tapes, which limits the size of a game and its sound and graphics to physical RAM. It was entirely possible as a lone programmer to create a commercial level game with a few weeks of late night hacking.

Here's one example of a network effect that happened without actually meeting other people: I certainly wouldn't have considered spending my pocket money as a thirteen year old on a new copy of the Zaks Z80 book, but I stumbled on a second-hand copy in a charity shop for a few pence.

I’ve found that there are oddballs in just about every culture who make new things. Some cultures celebrate them, others don’t. The most tolerant cultures tend to get the most interesting new art.

Edit: corollary, some of the best new art happens in the most restrictive environments. Maybe it’s a case of living at the extremes?

I think that some environments raised kids to be grittier, more focused on getting results (and less e.g. prone to consume time in entertainment).

> some of the best new art happens in the most restrictive environments

You reminded me of Paul Buchanan, frontman of The Blue Nile, revealing that they would compose and rehearse standing shoulders to a wall in a narrow corridor in a house in Glasgow - that was the room they had.

So real.

I grew up real poor and it made me hungry. I think that's where a lot of the hacker mentality comes from, one form of poverty or another.

I am hoping to raise children soon and I am wondering how to help them to feel a hunger for the world without suffering in the same way I was raised. It's hard for me to imagine how they'll learn to thirst for the experience of the world if they don't have the same socioeconomic pressures, but I think that will be one of my most profound growing experiences in this life. I intend to accept them for who they are and to try to give them as much opportunity as they can stomach.

I guess it may help achieving Goethes “In der Beschränkung zeigt such erst der Meister” (“the master shows himself through restriction” / Antoine de Saint Exupery’s “la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher” (“perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”)

If you have little to work with, adding stuff often forces you to remove or shrink something else.

Just for context: I grew up in a small village in Denmark. My window to the world was one-hour bus trips to the nearest town which had a decent library, including some computer magazines.

None of my peers did any programming, and since Denmark does not have flat-rate local calls, calling up via modem to connect to a BBS was never really an option -- so there was really no-one to share with. That is certainly somewhere were the internet would have been a plus.

I'm sure media coverage helped. Back in the 8-bit days in the UK there was a regular BBC TV show for computer buffs that introduced a lot of the concepts, and each platform had a minimum of one glossy magazine per month full of tips and info - I remember reading about assemblers for both ZX Spectrum (Z80) and Atari (6502) in these kind of publications, that were widely available at regular newsagents.

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