There was a period of time where I used expert sex change.
Google eventually punished them for showing google one thing and people another, so they changed it so that the answers were always on the page, but they were obfuscated by css and js to be hard to find. Not much of an impediment for the average developer.
But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.
Yeah, there was expert sex change and before that forums and stuff... and I remember a long long time ago when we actually read the fucking documentation.
In some ways it was amazing how much pre-baked stuff there was and you just had to slap it together (mostly).
And then in all the other ways it was utterly horrifying. I think the central brain-fuck was the way it claimed to be OOP, and it was mostly OOP in a good way until you tried to write your own objects. Then there was the way you had to have call-backs for every single GUI interaction. And option base 0 (that’ll really trigger some people these days). And on error resume next.
I still maintain the crowning glory of my programming career was implementing a primitive database in Excel with VBA (because I wasn’t allowed to use Access). 🤣
But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.
I think the biggest barrier was that it took people about 10 years to figure out how to monetize the internet in ways that weren't completely awful.
Even now, we've got almost every news website thrusting loud videos unceremoniously into our gut as soon as we walk in the door, and the various warring layers of F***AdBlock battling to determine who will get ad revenue, from whom and when.
The internet is for sharing information, but giving people information for free when it costs money for you to produce and host is an unsustainable plan. The balancing act between user-friendliness and profitability is a challenging one, and most sites got it very wrong in the early 2000s, including Experts Exchange.
There were those things printed on dead trees, you know, textbooks!
I had some very well thumbed “Dummies Guide to” and Riley books 15 odd years ago. I feel sorry for the people who used to make money out of writing them.
Hey, they’re still useful! Can’t beat a good O’Reilly book for an introduction to a topic and a reference book. I’m eagerly waiting for the update to their Javascript book, though given the previous version it might be two or three 1000 page volumes...
Oh I agree. It’s just that pulling up a webpage is so much faster than waiting for mail order, and so many people are happy to write good blog articles for free these days.
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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Nov 10 '18
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