undefined | Better HN

0 pointskuboble12d ago0 comments

Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it.

When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days.

I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.

0 comments

Hmm - I'm not sure I'd say that 'changed programming' - but the internet in general changed 'learning to program'. I can remember when I first discovered gopher and found I could read tons recent material for free, or finding stonybrook on the web - that was like a gold mine of algorithms! :-D

joefourier12d ago

I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory?

E.g.

void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (compar)(const void , const void* ));

And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentation from the pre-Internet age tended to be much better than today.

mech42211d ago

Yeah - but you have to be a good enough programmer to really understand the headers.. the 'bootstrapping' problem was real :-) Especially if you didn't live in a metropolitan/college area. My local library was really short on programming books - especially anything 'in depth'. Also, 'C' was considered a "professional's language" back then - so bookstores/libraries were more likely to have books on BASIC then 'C'

kubobleOP10d ago

I don't remember where we got the compilers from but we surely didn't buy them.

Also I don't know if it came with manual but my English wasn't good enough to read them anyways.

rustyzig11d ago

What kind of modern C wizardry is that? qsort was:

    qsort(base, nel, width, compar)
    char *base;
    int (*compar)();

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse