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I'm only 27 and I too started coding before there was Google. Dial-up was barely becoming a thing in my country. This was around 1995/1996.

I got my first internet connection at home in 2001 (ADSL). Before that I would go to the library to use their internet. But it was a huge novelty and I had no idea how to use it to help myself or how to find a BBS or anything. I knew how to IRC, but I didn't know there were other programmers there.

Those 5 years were a strange strange time. I would spend my days between the text editor and its built-in help files. This was Turbo Pascal. It was great, I could look up the function signature of anything in the language and some description of what it does. Once a week I would ask my mentor about things. The rest was tinkering.

And, honestly, it was amazing. I was having shitloads of fun just playing around with different functions, coming up with my own ideas on how to use them, figuring things out just by trying them and seeing what works better instead of immediately resorting to the internet and doing research like I do now.

Sure, I'm more productive now, but I'm having a lot less fun.

Having grown up with google, I still sometimes look at code (that I just got to work after an exhausting search on Stackoverflow) and think, "man, future generations of coders must figure out something more practical" and I'll probably get to tell them, "yep, that's how tedious it was" stories as well. What strikes me the most is how often code repeats, how often mistakes repeat. You can google a quite specific problem and more or less always find a result, likely a Stackoverflow article with tens of thousands of views. While it's great that we now have a collective knowledge tool to fight this, it also illustrates how much programming is still running in circles. We take pride in expertise and skill, but how much of this is memorizing workarounds and exotic quirks that shouldn't even be necessary?

What will be the next google? The next Stackoverflow? I doubt it will literally just be a better version of either. It will probably be better IDEs and debuggers. Heck, I doubt we'll continue to type as much as we do...

>I still sometimes look at code [...] and think, generations of coders must figure out something more practical

Imagine if package management happened this way: say you want to update your version of, oh I don't know, wget. First you Google "wget" and your operating system (analogy for your programming language). Then you open... not the wget page. There is none. You open stack overflow tabs. Not just one either. You look through them, i.e. the answers, the comments about the answers. Finally you find one that people report actually works, you copy a massive block of code into a text file. You make some changes, as it isn't really complete. You save it. You compile it. And, if it worked, there's the latest version of wget, and you move on.

Sound reasonable? Apparently it is for programming languages.

I am not sure that your analogy quite holds. Though maybe I am reading into it incorrectly. When I turn to Google or Stackoverflow the problem isn't something that could or should be solved by existing code or documentation. It's often more nebulous. I am sure there are those who strictly code by copying and pasting from StackOverflow but I would imagine in the long run they either get better at coding or they fail miserable.

For me and most of the people I know who look things up it's more like, "I am working on this piece of code which is giving an error, and I have stared at it for a bit and I don't see what is wrong. I wonder if others have seen this problem before. I need a bit of inspiration to get me through it." It's almost like paired programming. It's not so much that I am looking for an answer, I am looking for a toe hold in order to push myself just a little higher on a cliff. Inspiration from others experiences helps me to move along quicker. I got this in the past from BBS's, books, and magazines. But now the internet has made that process quite a bit faster and less expensive. And that seems reasonable to me.

yes and no. It is often nebulous, but at the same time the nebulous parts are often incredibly well-defined, so that if your IDE came up with it instead of a Google result, you could fill in the blanks there and then. But your IDE doesn't do your Googling for you, you have to leave and come back.

My guess is that IDEs and debuggers will be more integrated with what's available online. Let's say you have a compiling error. Currently you look up on google the error message the compiler gives you and most likely get a stackoverflow link with someone having the same problem - and hopefully someone else having answered it. Your IDE could do that automatically instead - there is already a plugin to access stackoverflow from emacs [0].

I imagine one further step would be to have some AI that can read snippets of your code that are causing problems and match it to similar snippets from Stackoverflow. Let's say your code is (in python):

   myCounter = 0
   while myCounter < 10:
       doSomething(counter)

The AI could realize that it's exactly the same mistake as this code that someone posted on stackoverflow because it ran infinitely:

   i,n = 1, 50
   while i < n:
       doSomethingElse(i)

(of course, I used a very trivial example, but you get the idea).

[0] https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos

> Currently you look up on google the error message the compiler gives you

this makes me afraid a little. although given the style of your examples i can imagine you have just not had a problem just because of using simple and permissive, modern languages which are difficult to make mistakes with.

due to the nature of compiler errors 99% of the time i can work it out by looking at the line of code.

1% of the time i need to read it carefully because it involves deeply nested C++ templates, and once i find the offending line i fix it 99% of the time in the same way.

the remaining tiny fraction i learn something new. but find that most of the google results are people who failed to solve the problem instead of anything useful, and just have to work it out for myself. i will waste time reading stackoverflow posts with no answers, or answers from people who only want to answer, rather than know an answer. occasionally an apple fanboy will rile me by claiming in some comment that everyone is doing it the wrong way and suggesting something so dumb my head nearly explodes. :)

I wonder if there is (or could be) a program that collates the most common bugs for X programming language from SO. So you run it as a sort of preprocessor, and it picks up stuff that the compiler either doesn't or can't.

Google's Tricorder http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43322.html

Not related to SO, but FindBugs and PMD for Java are designed to identify potential bugs, based on accumulated knowledge of "gotchas" (e.g. calling "multiply()" on a BigDecimal without assigning it to a new variable - BigDecimal is immutable).

> You can google a quite specific problem and more or less always find a result

usually when i have to resort to finding someone else's solution i find nothing. its probably a 70/30 or 80/20 split. when it comes to low level or actually challenging problems stackoverflow is more noise than answers. its become a bit like expertsexchange used to be, unless you are a web dev.

Just tie the compiler to Stackoverflow! I kid, but error messages could be much better.

There was a sorting algorithm that randomly selected a sort function from Stackoverflow posts until one of them was able to sort data

https://xkcd.com/1185/

Yeah. I didn't use Google (or any other search engine) when I started. For some I had an electronic reference with some syntax. But you know what I really used? The printed reference, either a manual for a language or a printed copy of it if the original was in electronic form. I'd have this stack of 200 pages of printed paper..

Nowadays I'm kind of scared of how much I rely on Google and StackOverflow, and fear I'm being too reliant on other people's knowledge, but you know what - there was an alternative, and it sucked.

Scared, but also delighted, because paper manuals and futzing around with syntax was a joyless chore.

When I learned programming, it was pretty common to get from a senior programmer, some huge source listing, and use it as a reference.

When I got my first real computer, I got Turbo Pascal, and its manual was excellent. Also (not atypical in the day) the language and its libraries replicated the essential functionality of the system, so the language was the system.

It was not unrealistic that I memorized TP in its entirety after a couple of years.

Today, I think the challenge is that we are programming much more complex systems, and the functionality we need is not self contained, but is pulled together from scattered bits and pieces. Much as I love the Python ecosystem, it must seem like an enormous squirming mass to someone who is accustomed to working within a package such as Matlab or Excel.

Larger (regional) public libraries were where I'd be able to find a pretty good variety of books about computing. I'd pick them up regardless of subject, e.g., the APL book despite having no access to APL-capable machines, or a text on expert systems despite having no AI fundamentals. It was fun and a little mysterious, and I did a lot of on-paper coding. It was also easy to get a good C programming book for more practical stuff.

Sometimes I'd scour BBSs for a little info, mostly about BBS programming in pascal. It was usually faster to go to the library, though, since the Fidonet transfers were irregular and usually a day between.

I'm not sure if having Google, or even a more developed internet, would have been better. I spent a lot of time "inventing" things, which, I think, really ingrained the basics into my head. It was, in a way, disappointing to learn later that some data structure was actually old and well researched by people with 20 years on me. But those are the ones that will always stick with me.

I didn't have internet access when I was a kid so I used the included qbasic documentation and books from the library that had example code (in the form of atari-style video games) when i taught myself to program.

Yes, I remember the days of the giant Java reference book being shared among cubicle-mates.

The other thing to keep in mind is that much more of the code we relied upon back then was closed source. Anyone remember the bad old days of decompiling Weblogic to track down what was going on with some strange bug under the hood?

We had Usenet news groups back then, it was the StackOverflow of the 90s :)

not if you had no internet. :)

i had help files and terrible books. :P

if you were a late comer to those days it was amazingly good. the help file from qbasic got me started down a path that didn't end, and getting a visual basic with msdn on cd was even better... it makes me sad when i see the msdn today, and even more so the apple and google docs which are absolutely terrible, bordering on useless in many cases. don't even mention linux development which still seems to be stuck in 1970s mentalities when it comes to usability.

The help in programs used to be fairly comprehensive though. I don't think I have used one for years.

Lets not forget about the MSDN subscription that came via CDs.

There was Compuserve dialup. Expensive and slow as molasses.

Compuserve was great for its time. It allowed you to connect to other developers. I have never been more active on forums then I was on the compuserve forums. It WAS the place for developers.