How did old school devs make it without Google or Stackoverflow?

How did old school devs make it without Google or Stackoverflow?

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Back then I used Usenet and mailing lists. Contacting authors/maintainers directly and FAQs were quiet common too.

Back then they weren't developing in the latest javascript virtual dom bullshit that changed every hour.

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By not being dumbass code monkeys like 99% are today.

Actual competence.

They probably actually had to learn how to do things rather than rely on karma-hungry pajeets with one extra year of CS under their belts

They made it because all the shit that they programmed wasn't complicated at all. They also didn't work with OOP, they primarily used procedural.

OOP is older than stack overflow

By reading the fucking manual.

I'm getting a cramp and backache just by looking at that

Slide rulers.

Per RTFM shitposting.

/thread

o'rly

you didn't use a bajillion pajeet libraries to make your statelss ai blockchain gooey app running on the latest vue on typescript with transpilining into php and then to machine code and then to some deprecated version of javascript so your website runs on netscape navigator 4.0, oh and electron too I guess

That it is, but not older than most of the programmers that wrote the foundation of what we use today.

You use the man pages and read books like Direct Methods for Sparse Linear Systems to learn how to code well.

>borat_hacks_saudi_arabia.jpg

By doing the needful

By reading 1 weird book by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan.

Javascript basedboys hate it

calling or emailing, compiling could take days

Knowing how to program and reading the fucking manuals.

Delphi 7 came with a complete obj pascal manual and complete WINAPI documentation in windows .hlp format, for example.
Even back in Turbo Pascal you could type an instruction and press F1 while selecting it to get help about how to use it. And it was glorious.

"What did people do before the internet?" fixed your thread, damn zoomer

The MSDN library that came on 2 or 3 discs.

Official documentation
Far simpler programs
It wasn't always good code

I work on a product from 92, and most of the 90s and early 00s code is unreadable dogshit that only the individual writer understood. Comments, conventions, and documentation are almost non-existent.

Books, manuals, etc.

Some things were harder to learn, but because of the effort required to learn you gained a far stronger foundation. I think that's with everything though, not just coding.

I used a lot of mailing lists and, later, IRC.

I was writing code back in the 90s and we commented like crazy.

proper and official documentation. A modern example of good documentation could be for example intel programmers manual, or datasheets for microcontrollers

I really, really, really like this image.

Do you mind if I save it?

Everything was a lot simpler back then.

>I was writing code back in the 90s and we commented like crazy.

God bless you. I'd kill for someone on the team in 95 to explain some of the shit they wrote

no, i've already used the 1 save allowed on this image

mailing lists

What kind of nose is that?

Everything was easy.

They didn't worry about doing things "right", they made it work however they could.

Borland was awesome. I miss Philippe Kahn's cool company, nestled in the Scotts Valley foothills. Their compilers were cheaper and better than MS's.

This. Grep was originally written in one day based on ed source code. Back then, it was a novelty program and made things immensely easier. Nowadays, you do the same, and it's not even worth it to put on a public repo.

heh, when i was in high school (back in 1987), i wrote code for a big shipping company in town. they called me up in 1999 to help them prepare for y2k. holy fuck! they were still running my old code. no comments, of course because it was all written in basic, and memory constraints meant every single char counted. variable names were all things like q1, w3, t1.

i started programming in 1982. back then my friends and i referred to ourselves as hackers because we would just hack shit together to get it to work. 35+ years later and i still have that mentality. sure, i can write clean, well-structured code, but when i want to just get something working, i love going into stream-of-consciousness mode and just doing whatever it takes to make something work.

/thread

>make something with all those things you hate
>become millionaire

I support Delphi and C programs from a single developer that go back to the late nineties. Code is an absolute mess for the most part. But it's generally reliable.

This is prolly the answer

yeah, although we have tons of abstraction writing flask or rails webapps, we are still making immensely complex stuff i never even dreamed of when i finished my undergrad
my first job after graduating was writing a perl/cgi webapp. i had multiple books that i referenced, and developing "simple" features could take several days. now we just import some libraries and bang out multiple features in a single day, with a couple hours for stack overflow and documentation perusing at most, and very rarely do you have to worry about CSS cross-browser compatibility if you're not doing anything too fancy

they had boomer jobs where they didn't have to be competent to survive.

Remember to always do the opposite of what Jow Forums says to live a good life.

Jow Forums hates things are successful and popular.

Most questions on stackoverflow aren't about how to program, they're about how to do something very specific in the context of some large and poorly designed framework among dozens of large and poorly designed frameworks you have to integrate for a given project. Back then, you learned a small instruction set for a given machine and peripherals. There were no surprises and everything was logical and you didn't spend all your time trying to understand retarded interfaces designed by retarded library authors.

with the power of hungry indians

>where they didn't have to be competent to survive.
this is what actually zoomer js code artisans believe.

This, and mental maturity and perseverance.

These days you're learning the ins and outs of libraries just as much as you are the language itself. And with frameworks you're often left guessing how the creators intended you to do something. Then you want to create something yourself, you're struck with the question of whether it has already been done for you.

man 2 strcpy

Intelligence, intuition and critical thinking.

Free Pascal is still good. What I loved about TP was its IDE and the fact that the majority of the built-in functions had a complete, clear, ready-to-run example program at the bottom of the help page. A lot of modern open source programming languages aren't up to par.

>the shit that they programmed wasn't complicated at all
It's worth making a distinction here. They still had a lot of essential complexity to manage, and the hardware they used made it more important to find a O(log n) algorithm when possible instead of a merely O(n) one. However, they faced a lot less incidental complexity. The Web browser alone is responsible for half of the shit we have to deal with.

>it's not even worth it to put on a public repo.
You'd be surprised. Sometimes you put the simplest thing out there and years later you get an email with a "thank you" and a small bug report.

These are the correct answers. I've been programming for 25 years, and have never read a manual.

There weren't billion of frameworks, patters, apis back then. All you had to do is to move bytes from one address to another. It's not that hard, honestly.

Did you bring that code up to date?

>Remember to always do the opposite of what Jow Forums says to live a good life.
Don't rape everyone you meet.

This. I make shit for myself all the time, but while they make my life easier, they always seem so inconsequential I never bother uploading them anywhere.

>i started programming in 1982.
Don't you get bored of all the zoomer incompetence on Jow Forums? It's way worse than it was even five years ago. I was born a short while after you started programming, and I can barely tolerate it here.

lazarus is pretty comfy though i've only really fucked with it on windows. do their cross platform gui framework is fine or is it shit? or do you use something else besides lazarus?

>Delphi 7
That was the best Delphi, after it everything went downhill. I remember you could ditch all the "Raid" aspect and code a Windows application using just win api calls, but stuff like direct X or OpenGL needed to be done in a slightly different way than if you were using C++

I tried to use Lazarus to make a RS232 controller for a certain piece of machinery and the program works for like a few messages then it crashes. I gave up because I don't want to spend time reading the source code to see why it happens

The GUI framework seems fine, but I haven't used it seriously myself. Mid-sized cross-platform applications built with it, for example doublecmd.sourceforge.net, work well enough and look good enough on both Linux and Windows.

Probably because of a memory fault. FP has manual memory management. You catch these errors with a debugger.

What a piece of garbage

Why the fuck he uses 2 keyboards for 1 computer lol. Does this allow you to code 2x faster

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The horrors of legacy code.

If only you know how bad things are.

Nice b8

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Memory, you now have it.
Libraries is just code you don't need wasting resources.
You go from a full and complete program to fragments of broken code that don't belong.
"apps" are not programs they are cancer.

Autism

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This. The Commodore distributor in my country decided to properly translate and supply a thorough programming book with each C64 sold.

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It wasn't easy at all, in fact it was quite rough. Programming tools were painfully limited. If you were writing a game, you had to plot your graphics on graph paper and convert everything to hex values by hand. Will Wright talked about writing his own C64 character editor program. If you worked for a big company, you could write code on a minicomputer or workstation, but those were still very crude and limiting compared with a modern PC.

Especially when you had to stare at a postage-stamp sized CRT all day and not go blind.

That could have been my dad in the 80s, except he didn't have a Mac.

I guess people had a higher pain threshold back then and there was not as much stuff to do so you could spend days writing code with no distractions.

Better technology is making people retarded and unhappy, and social media was a mistake.

Magazines and downloading example source code from BBS's

Or _playing_ games because I can't imagine how any non-masochist could play 80s CRPGs like Ultima other than that they had more free time on their hands in those days.

Coding was easy as fuck back in the day. Average CS grad could probably write entire Windows 95 in a couple of months now.

There was simply less to learn. And the code they wrote was fucking garbage.

It varied a lot, you had some people like Philippe Kahn who were gods and a lot of so-so programmers. Everyone made a big deal out of how brilliantly written Turbo Pascal was unlike Microsoft's bloated piece of shit Pascal compiler.

Game programming tended to often be below the standard of application software programming because game coders were often just inexperienced teens-early 20s kids.

Uggh, Richard Garriot was a fucking lousy coder.

The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth was sitting not far away so they could look up whatever search algorithm they were trying to optimize and find answers. If you couldn't buy it you just went to a campus library and got inter-library delivery for free (which still exists)

No ctrl+f search.

Can't ask it a question.

Never updates with recent developments.

Fuck books.

They were actually competent and the employees were exclusively White heterosexual males. No women, no Sôyboï, no SJW, no tranny.

PC DOS 2.0 took about nine months of work. This was for maybe 80k of total code (DOS kernal+external utilities). Imagine needing nine months to write 80k of code.

Not as bad as java(shipt) the pajeets and fresh bachelors (or even worse, laid off journalists) write.
Most beautiful codebase i've seen was written in ALGOL68. Part of it is probably that it is fully specified and you can pretty much map the spec 1:1 if you know some cute ALGOL68 idioms.

>no ctrl+f
table of contents and indexes

Handbooks.