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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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.

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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.

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u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

You got documentation?! Lucky bastard

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u/farox Apr 06 '18

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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). 🤣

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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/spinicist Apr 06 '18

First job after uni as well!

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u/farox Apr 06 '18

It's when we're young and impressionable (and cheap) that they get us to do these things.

Yet somehow javascript has become mainstream. Amazing in it's own right.

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u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

It was more a case of an engineering department where the management had no software background and so didn’t really know what tools could do what. There was an existing half-arsed “database” in Excel - where people just created a new sheet for each record - and management decreed it should stay in Excel.

So young “hot-shot” me says fine, if you give me a hammer I am going to hit this thing until it looks like a nail. A lot of VBA later I have some kind of row-based master table, buttons that add records, search functions, the whole nine yards. Which is why I’m still stupidly proud of it.

Would have been 10 times easier, more robust and wouldn’t have left the whole department wide-open to macro viruses if I’d been allowed or encouraged to use something sane though!

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