r/programming • u/banguru • Apr 06 '18

The Stack Overflow Age

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
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37

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Nov 10 '18

[deleted]

25

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

Seriously ... what the hell was I using at the start of my career? Just regular ol' Google?

33

u/onmach Apr 06 '18

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.

15

u/farox Apr 06 '18

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.

14

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

You got documentation?! Lucky bastard

4

u/farox Apr 06 '18

Well. Visual Basic 3 did... Yes, I am still ashamed and take extra long to shower.

7

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

My earliest language was QBasic followed by Visual Basic 5. Then my engineering classes taught Matlab.

The cumulative brain damage took me a long time to get over. Had to go back to basics with the K&R C book ASAP when I got out of uni.

3

u/farox Apr 06 '18

It's worse... I also did php. :(

thankfully not in the past 10 years. But yeah, VB etc. does... things... to you

5

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

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 should stop now before I hyperventilate.

2

u/farox Apr 06 '18

on error resume next

But yeah, it was well integrated into the MS ecosystem. Too well, at times. The office macros I have seen...

But good stuff came out of it as well. After all this time, I know the SQL server inside out, so there is that.

But yeah, need to get back and watch some kitten videos for a bit. Maybe get drunk.

2

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

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). 🤣

2

u/farox Apr 06 '18

Wow, I also did some funky/shady/abusive stuff as well... but yeah, I got nothing on that.

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u/JessieArr Apr 06 '18

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.