The joy of doing things the hard way

While rummaging around a while back I stumbled across a stack of old copies of The Delphi Magazine. And of course I started reminiscing.

When I was a lad

Did you know that information was once distributed on paper?!

That was back at a time in prehistory before the web. It took forever to solve a programming problem, especially for those of us without a network of programming friends.

What did we do before Stack Exchange? We struggled that's what. We browsed magazine back issues, we ordered library books and, more often than not, we never found an answer.

Back to first principles

But did that isolation have one advantage? If you were facing a problem you might just have to get creative and solve it yourself.

Of course, it probably meant reinventing the wheel. Your solution might be far from the commonly accepted solution. It might even be laughably sub-optimal. But if it worked, it was an achievement. It was creative.

I'm just wondering if we might have lost some of that? I know I now rush to the net every time I run into a problem, whereas before I'd sit and think (often in the bath) because that was the only option.

The joy of doing things the hard way

For years I disliked using code libraries, because writing my own solution was more interesting. Come to think of it, I'm still a bit like that. The joy for me isn't in finishing a project, it's in solving the problem (which could explain all those unfinished projects!). So the more help I get, the less rewarding the process.

But I do have the luxury of being an amateur - no deadlines, no boss, no profits at risk. Because it's a hobby I go where my interest takes me. I fully understand that professionals haven't got that luxury.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a Luddite and suggesting, as old farts tend to, that things were better in my day. They weren't. Far from it. It's just that we may have lost a little in return for the huge improvement in access to information. Maybe things were just a little more stimulating back then?




Comments

  1. Steve Jordi12:49 pm

    Another life changer was the introduction of newsgroup forums, before they were submerged by porn and illegal downloads. C, C++, Fortran, Pascal... dedicated forums, you had a blocking problem, asked a question, targeting only people focused on the same matters as you, and you usually got an answer within a few hours. People helping other people since they met the same pitfalls and wanted to share the experience. This was a major tool for developers! Gone was the time of swearing for weeks on a problem someone else already faced and solved. And helping others was so rewarding too. This was much better organized than StackOverflow IMHO.
    Newsgroups changed my life forever.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Delphidabbler7:24 am

      I'd forgotten about that! Didn't use them much myself because I was a late adopter of the Internet (largely because our local providers ran on clockwork back then!)

      Delete
  2. Michael Riley5:43 pm

    Made me smile. I took magic lessons in a group setting when I was twelve. After watching the magician perform a trick I blurted out, "Hey! How did you do that?" The magician looked me square in the eyes and said, "Michael, if you really want to know how this trick is done you have to figure it out for yourself." That was my introduction to "problem solving".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Max7:32 am

    I, too, remember The Delphi Magazine and the joy of solving problems on my own. Many years ago before Delphi, I needed to solve for the internal rate of return of a series of irregular cash flows on my old Commodore 64. Only later did I realize that I had used the bisection method of finding an iterative solution. (Later, a friend shared an article from a chemical engineering magazine that introduced me to the secant method which usually converged so much faster on the old slow machine.)

    I recently asked the Bard AI to write a Delphi function using the secant method to solve for the internal rate of return given a series of irregular cash flows and fall back to the bisection method if the secant method did not converge on a solution. Bard returned perfectly acceptable code functions.

    At my advanced age (81), I wonder how future programmers will incorporate the tools that will be available in the future. Somehow, I doubt that old-fashioned research and problem solving will ever be totally obsolete though.

    ReplyDelete
  4. dummzeuch6:53 pm

    Even before the newsgroups became widely available outside universities there were other discussion channels: Mailboxes and later Fidonet. I used Fidonet a lot before I even got Internet access at home. Internet access at work was even later because companies tended to see it as a waste of money and employee time.

    ReplyDelete

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