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by an_aparallel 937 days ago
this is one of my BIGGEST frustrations learning to program. i do...not...want....to go online to work out hooow to do something. I want a "manual" - written well...that i can study and find the write tools to use...which for example (Pythons docs...are not...at least for beginners) - i then want to use the tools in said manual....to create. With the syntax, and the words you've defined oh so well in said manual. But...as the language grows...we'll just have to live with this never happening :)

this is something i get jealous of older programmers who grew up on old computers, with printed manuals...when languages were smaller, and the scope of programs were also smaller...and didnt require external libraries.
2 comments
Ma8ee 937 days ago
Books are still written, and there are quite a few online courses, and some of them aren't bad. I've learned that to be productive in a new language or framework I really need to dive into some of those resources. The manuals you find online are rarely good enough to learn from, and all the tutorials and "getting started" just scratches enough on the surface to make me frustrated.
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ElectricalUnion 937 days ago
Programs were smaller with less expectations on them. Users were few and forcily clustered near the computer system. Attackers were limited and computer security was physical access control security.

Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic.

And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program.

And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.

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Ma8ee 934 days ago
I’d say that we are programming on a higher level of abstraction today, so the programs do in some senses do more, but the size of the code we wrote then and now, and the complexities are of the same order of magnitude.
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