Yes, when you were learning to develop in the 80's. This has a slight undertone of bootstrap lifting and a total lack of empathy for people who have little access to stuff that is thrown out like trash in the west. Use your brain.
> Yes, when you were learning to develop in the 80's. This has a slight undertone of bootstrap lifting and a total lack of empathy for people who have little access to stuff that is thrown out like trash in the west.
Speak for yourself. You know nothing my access to computers, which was not the privileged ‘western’ fantasy you imagine.
I was thinking about what it would be like to have a smartphone to learn on, and for someone who grew up without easy access to computers until later I think it would be amazing.
Taking your comment in the best possible light, I see this as a general indicator that for would-be-developers, things are often so much better than they were, despite the fact that many OSes are locked down.
Services like Azure and GitHub make it easy to get started, and combined with great documentation like MDN and Q&A on StackOverflow, so much more information and opportunity is available.
I remember struggling to learn QBASIC as a kid in the '90s without any resources (I didn't have internet). My programs were 20 times the length they could have been if only I'd been able to learn a few basic data structures.
As someone who is just learning coding in Python again, the amount of available learning material and projects create the luxury problem of overabundance. It's like drinking from a fire-hose as it's nearly impossible to discern the myriad of low-quality from high-quality content or even what's even relevant in order to get a general programming education.
Too many companies trying to lock you into eco-systems, new frameworks springing up and becoming obsolete too fast. Do I need github or is gitlab better? Flask? Flutter? Django? Blockchain? Machine learning? To a beginner this is all a swirling mess and leads to being overwhelmed and paralyzed.
This - I never felt the lack of learning materials. I saved my pocket money to buy Turbo C++ and Assembler in my teens. They came with nice fat books that explained standard libraries and instruction sets. My library had more books with references for DOS interrupts/syscalls, memory managers. I got a game programming book that showed me how to push pixels into the framebuffer, and which ports to bang to get a Sound Blaster to sing. I had the Mike Abrash optimization book and spent much of idle school time doodling pipeline simulations on paper.
There was just a handful of integrations like that, and the rest was up to you. The world was less interconnected, there were no REST APIs or gigantic browser/OS API surfaces.
I asked for a Borland C book and compiler, which my parents gave me for my 15th birthday (I think)... I tried to read it but I couldn't understand it.
I also used to carry around and read the "Practical C++ programming book", trying and failing to grok it... what I didn't understand (and what I didn't hear anywhere) was that trying small examples is the only way to really get started in a new programming language.
As a high schooler, the only languages I made progress in were the super-approachable ones -- like TI-basic and QBASIC.
The modern internet would have made it all so much easier :-)
I mostly just remember copying stuff from here and there, not too different from the age or stackoverflow, just printed and mostly correct!
I did have some lucky breaks, like going to local small town art school to study "computer graphics" as a pre-teen with a 20-year old tech student who would just casually explain to us anything from alpha blending to linear algebra. Said student later went on to design GPUs for Bitboys, ATI and AMD.
> Taking your comment in the best possible light, I see this as a general indicator that for would-be-developers, things are often so much better than they were,
That’s exactly the point - for someone who is enthusiastic, the resources a phone provides are vast.
When I was learning, not only were the computers primitive and expensive, but even access to information about them required all manner of work, travel, etc.