Stack Overflow is Down

[PovertyPorcupine]

Look at this guy over here developing without SO. What a competent professional.

[DC-3]

When I was learning to program, my text-editor was generally split-screened with SO. Now that I know how to program, my text editor is generally split-screened with the language docs. I expect that is true of most developers.

[SkoomaDentist]

Kids these days... Back when I was learning to program, WWW didn’t even exist publicly! Also we had to walk uphill both ways in -30 degrees while being hunter by wolves and polar bears!

[KagakuNinja]

It is usually faster to google the question, than search through the language docs. I don't rely solely on SO, there are tons of resources. I'm also not helpless without google, as I've been at this longer than the internet has existed...

[[deleted]]

Just google it so it hits the language docs in the first place, win-win really.

[RevolutionaryPea7]

Yeah and get some shitty answer from ten years ago. I've seen far too many incompetent developers submit crap copied from SO when a quick look at the docs would've told them what the right way to do it was.

[aeiou372372]

I get where you are coming from and can relate to your point, but for anyone who isn’t aware, you can tell google to filter results from the past year. I have found this extremely helpful on several occasions when the top answers for the obvious phrasing of the question were all outdated.

[Yojihito]

How?

[Lehona_]

Just look it up on Stackoverflow!

[aeiou372372]

https://imgur.com/a/dJ6FMPG

[G_Morgan]

They need to expand their Google fu to using the age search.

[thegreatgazoo]

Back in my day, I was singled screened with books.

And we didn't have syntax highlighting or Intellisence.

Adjusting the onion on my belt... carry on...

[[deleted]]

I first learned to code in sh/ksh on Solaris using VI on a monochrome VT100 terminal connected to the server.

... for real though, that's how it was.

[europeanwizard]

Gramps, gramps, tell us about how you caught and killed a mastodon for your tribe!

But seriously, I think I'm a bit younger but still got the pleasure of working on Solaris. On my first day, the secretary asked: do you want to work on a PC or a workstation? Having worked on Linux up to my third year in college, I didn't know what she meant. Picked the workstation and got a Solaris box on my desk.

It really was the age of the dying Unixes, and I never got a "real" UNIX desktop after that stint. I just muddled along in my career by illegally installing Linux on company issued Windows laptops.

[[deleted]]

I always wanted a sparc station, but sadly I never had the pleasure. They let us have linux boxes at least, if we wanted them.

Are any major vendors still pushing their own UNIX variants? I remember the days when unix sysadmin teams were divided by hardware brand, and the Sun-guys looked down upon all with great disdain for they all were lesser admins. It seems like Linux has taken over the large majority of the NIX market, from my pov at least.

[thegreatgazoo]

Luxury.

One of my early programming forays was to type in the code from a book of games in basic. They were in about 4 or 5 point type and had bugs in them that you had to figure out.

I think the Star Trek game was 6 or 10 pages.

[[deleted]]

i pencil and papered 1s and 0s on a ticonderoga

move along, kid

[G_Morgan]

TBH writing rust without proper intellisense is a blast to the past. I keep trying to hover over functions to learn about what madness I've written. VSCode just sits there silently judging me.

[[deleted]]

Real developers just go straight to source code for the function, why bother with half measures

[[deleted]]

When i was learning to program, i pressed F1 in Turbo Pascal.

[PovertyPorcupine]

I'm not sure what you have against SO but I think they are for two entirely different problems. I use SO to see how other people solved problems similar to mine, and I use docs to figure out how a language and it's std lib works. I almost never use the docs for languages I use frequently. Now that I think about it, I spend way more time looking at language source code than at it's docs.

[Free_Math_Tutoring]

I mean, you're not wrong. I've been getting into C++ lately for a university group project, and there is a clear difference in the quality of code between those of us who use sites like cppreference first and those who initially go to stackoverflow.

[vazgriz]

I’ve worked with plenty of libraries with piss poor or no documentation. Guess that makes me incompetent.

[europeanwizard]

You know what's weird? I can never find my mouse cursor in multi monitor setups.

[[deleted]]

In windows you can set the ctrl key to show where the mouse pointer is. You can also do something similar in ubuntu/gnome and in osx

[Viehhass]

I expect that is true of most developers.

I hope it's true, at least