The closest to vibecoding in the 90's was to open Borland's Turbo C help in any page, copy and paste the example and modify it until you understand it or until it did what you wanted.
You know, that's exactly how I learned to program.
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.
Wow, that’s exactly my memory. As far as my family was concerned I was spending day and night in front of the “blue screen”. I got as far as programming a GUI by copying windows 95 pixel by pixel, text editor, fonts, cd player, minesweeper. I wish I had the code.
The closest to vibecoding in the 10's was to keep searching Stack Overflow for questions vaguely asking similar things as what you wanted and copy-paste things until it kind of worked.
Fairly confident I've never copy-pasted much of any code from stack overflow directly. Shell commands, yes, but code? Usually i just use the answer as inspiration.
Still, you can find an awful lot of solutions there, no question
Turbo pascal help for me! The polynomial example taught me how to use pointers. Before that, I could only use static arrays up to a certain length.
Learning about heap allocation was euphoric. I kept beaming because I had unlocked infinite memory, and people around me didn't get why I was such a happy teenager.
To be fair, I already knew about memory regions from PEEK/POKEing on a commodore as a child, but it was always static and pre-populated.
Definitely! Our current focus is on Unity, because that's what we're most used to, but we'd also build the solution for at least Unreal and Godot as well!
No, not a good Idea. We did tons of efforts to achieve good multiplatform open source dev tools with exclusively FLOSS dependencies. Take dev-cpp as a remainder of what happens when people follow such path.
I may be, however most of those kids are actually using tablets, which adds another vector to the whole perception problematic.
Still, I try to do my little part, with exception of VSCode, given some SDK requirements that I don't control, anything Electron based only has a place on a browser tab on my personal computers.
I almost forgot how bad the dev-tools ecosystem was back in the day. I remember back in 1998, when I was 15, I took on a vacation job in a car shop (wet sanding car parts) just to afford Visual C++ 6.0.
I also had to order the compiler through a local dealer and delivery took 6 weeks. But I still have the box and CD-ROM :)
Think of it like this:
Delphi's existence is a reminder that people will regress to the comfort of windows if they find a tool "that just works", is fast, efficient and native.
It is a reminder that these properties are to be taken seriously.
that's simply not true, no C++ standard version has removed old-school style C++ features, nothing is stopping you from using plain Jane C++ with new, delete, plain-old-data structs, etc.
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.
In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".
I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:
What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.
The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".
The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.
Yes, but remember the onus is on the student to figure out how they learn best. Tertiary education is no longer about spoon-feeding (adult) students everything.
Since the parent mentioned a book, here is the reference, and also two related Wikipedia pages regarding how to learn effectively:
I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).
As I said other times: we need a Free Hardware Foundation now like we needed the Free Software Foundation for many years. The GSD (GNU software distribution) is basically a standard GNU-Linux distro using GUIX as the package manager seems very interesting, but if you want to run 100% free software on a RYF-certified device you'll have to pay a lot of extra money for 15 years old class hardware.
We need the equivalent of a Linus Torvalds + Richard Stallman but hardware. We were lucky to have had both for software at the same time. We need the same luck again now.
Pointless. Silicon fabs currently cost billions of dollars. They are single points of failure. Even if the market starts trending towards openness, governments can just regulate a backdoor into these fabs. They have every incentive in the world to do it. Democratized access to cryptography is subversive.
We need some kind of 3D printer that can print computer chips. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own
software at home. Democratized electronics fabrication. That's the only way we'll be saved.
While I, for the most part, agree to this in principle, at the moment, general compute hardware production is relatively safe (or so it seems).
But when it comes to humongous costs, the fact that even "open source AI models" don't have their training data available (the actual "source") is one thing, but even if it was, it'd be impossible to retrain a model "at home". But if data was available, I am sure any of the existing free software foundations, or a new one, could rally users around sponsoring one DC.
We are back in the "mainframe" days where top-end compute is accessible only to few (with lots of money).
That was for show purposes. It was certainly intended to display OS capabilities while impressing people at the same time. Linux eventually came to dominate the live-cd scene in the early 2000's but, to this day, people still cute this demo as specially incredible. Actually, there was Linux with X11 and a functional browser that run from a floppy. And that is something that is really impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
I worked on one of the Linux live CDs (Linuxcare bootable business card / LNX-BBC), which we designed to fit in 50 megabytes. I remember being kind of jealous of the QNX floppy, because I felt that it had about 25% as much software functionality as we did, but in about 3% of the storage space!
I mean, basically we could interact with a lot more hardware, support more file formats, filesystems, and network protocols, and had more high-level scripting languages. But there still seemed to be a huge disproportion where the QNX floppy was just so much more space-efficient for what it did.
Come on: "Specifically, [Dave] is using bifacial solar panels– panels that have cells on both sides. In his preferred orientation, one side faces South, while the other faces North. [Dave] is in the Northern Hemisphere, so those of you Down Under would have to do the opposite, pointing one face North and the other South."
As Dave has shown in previous videos, bifacials are not symmetrical, and the backside produces less power under same conditions. So N-S would be different from S-N orientation.
Microsoft Quick Basic help was also gold.