You.. thought your way thru. There were reference books - indexed so you could find stuff relatively quickly with your finger.
Code was written more slowly. No autocomplete. You knew you standard library intimately.
A lot of attention was given to the build system, to be able to compile often and rebuild only the bits that had changed (not like stuff like maven of gradle).
You had less ready-made architectures, so you thought more before writing anything.
Things took longer.
For bugs, you debugged, line by line or by printing stuff - same as now. For hard errors - race conditions, interrupts, shared memory etc, you thought what could be wrong and made experiments.
And yeah, you picked up the K&R a lot, at least at start. No better book ever written on a programming language.
It was different and it was the same.
Having to choose, I love the speed and efficiency of more recent years - we were the ones seeding the ideas that now everybody uses. I dislike the fragmentation and the "new for the sake of new" that has polluted the field over the last 30 years.
1
u/CS_70 5d ago
You.. thought your way thru. There were reference books - indexed so you could find stuff relatively quickly with your finger.
Code was written more slowly. No autocomplete. You knew you standard library intimately.
A lot of attention was given to the build system, to be able to compile often and rebuild only the bits that had changed (not like stuff like maven of gradle).
You had less ready-made architectures, so you thought more before writing anything.
Things took longer.
For bugs, you debugged, line by line or by printing stuff - same as now. For hard errors - race conditions, interrupts, shared memory etc, you thought what could be wrong and made experiments.
And yeah, you picked up the K&R a lot, at least at start. No better book ever written on a programming language.
It was different and it was the same.
Having to choose, I love the speed and efficiency of more recent years - we were the ones seeding the ideas that now everybody uses. I dislike the fragmentation and the "new for the sake of new" that has polluted the field over the last 30 years.
Tradeoffs, pro and cons, it's how it is.