Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> the scene might as well be proprietary.

That is such hyperbole. I have no formal IT background and I taught myself the Linux command line, Python, and Emacs in the course of a single year after I heard about this new Linux thing that was free to install. This was 2000, and from communities like Slashdot I saw there were plenty of other nerdy young people taking up the CLI and other Linux stuff, just out of curiosity and without any connection with the IT industry.

Sure, none of this software will ever appeal to the broad masses*, but since the 1990s programming has become so much more accessible to the general public, because of both the free-of-charge software and the free-of-charge documentation. Learning to program on earlier platforms could be very expensive.

* Still, I have heard rumors of a corporation in the 1980s where the secretarial staff – middle-aged women with no formal computer-science education – wrote some custom Emacs Lisp and/or Awk. Maybe learning even relatively arcane stuff can be done by anyone if their salary depends on it.

I would still disagree. 80s home computers pretty much all came with BASIC built-in, up to the PCs with QBASIC. The documentation was right there, and you had everything you needed to just boot up and start programming. Many even booted up within the programming language by default.

And at the time, most programs were text-mode. I/O was only keyboard, screen, and disk (and maybe mouse, joystick, and serial port if you wanted to get fancy). When your program started you had full control of the entire system. There was no multitasking, 100+ processes running in the background, nor GUI architecture over an OS subsystem. So you only needed to learn a very very few things to be able to build software roughly equivalent to professional store-bought software. Simple logic and data structures and 3-6 types of I/O and that was it.

From there it was a short step to something more powerful like Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic, again both of which were pretty much "batteries included" everything you need in one tool.

Today's landscape with its enormous stacks, build tools, cambrian explosion of languages, frameworks, and libraries, etc., and layers upon layers of abstraction and indirection between you and the machine, plus countless dependencies, package managers, containers, etc., all of which are constantly changing and shifting out from under you, is baffling even to professional developers.

Luckily, it is easier to find documentation, tutorials, and other actual people to ask about stuff. But also a lot of that is quickly outdated, faddish and evangelical, just assumes that you already know 500 other things, or assumes that you know absolutely nothing, so only covers the barest basics.

So it's really still more difficult than just picking up a book about C, QBASIC, Turbo Pascal, or Visual Basic and getting started was back in the day.

I've mostly self taught in programming since around 1981, and I've helped several friends and colleagues learn. My impression is that it's more difficult, like you say, but not prohibitively so.

People just instinctively steer clear of the "professional" tools and documentation, and choose their battles. Even well into the Windows 3.1 era, a lot of people who programmed stuck with MS-DOS text mode. Today, our code runs in Jupyter notebooks. We get stuff done. If it needs a framework or a container, we just don't go there.

There's a mild suspicion amongst amateurs, that the professionals are creating the complexity for their own entertainment or job security. It doesn't seem to make the software better (most "users" think that software is getting worse and worse), or less costly to write and maintain.

To put it more charitably, the struggles of commercial programmers are not invisible to us. I work in a department adjacent to a large programming team. By not attempting to write commercial-scale software, we avoid many if not most of the headaches.

There was at least one popular home computer which was never just text mode but booted in permanent bitmapped graphic mode, directly in BASIC line editor. Entering a command would execute immediately, entering it with the line number in front would add that line to the program.

So right after boot a single command could draw a line or a circle. One was not supposed to even type the letters for any command, but had to enter it like on the pocket calculators: the commands were written on the keyboard, in more colors, so just looking at the keyboard one directly saw all the available commands.

The barrier there was learning to enter the needed mode to reach the appropriate color and learning the syntax and the meaning of the commands.

Every user learned to enter at least one command and its syntax: the one which allowed loading any program from the tape. It was a full command with the empty string parameter meaning "match any name": LOAD ""

Reply on news.ycombinator.com