Rant: My first 'hello world' took 3 hours back in 2005

I was helping my nephew learn Python yesterday and he had a working 'hello world' in like 30 seconds on his phone. It took me 3 hours just to install Turbo C++ on my dads old Windows 98 machine back in the day. Anyone else feel like learning coding has gotten way easier but somehow scarier with all the options now?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_bailey27d ago

Yeah, I gotta push back a little. Is it really that serious? You spent 3 hours installing a dinosaur compiler on a 20 year old machine, that's just a different kind of problem. Now your nephew had it working in 30 seconds and you're calling it "scarier"? Feels like you're romanticizing the struggle a bit. Most of those old issues were just bad setup and lack of documentation, not some noble coding challenge. If anything, the scary part is how easy it is to copy-paste code without understanding a single line of it. But that's always been an option, just with extra steps back then. Take it easy on the nostalgia, your mileage may vary but I think we're fine.

rivera.henry27d ago

The copy paste issue goes way deeper now though because people don't even need to read the code to make it work. Back in the day you at least had to fix compile errors and hunt down missing semicolons, which forced some understanding. Now you can grab a whole block from Stack Overflow and it just runs, so the learning happens later when something breaks and you have no clue what it does.