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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

I've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays.

We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download.

I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.

And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking...

And now we've got Claude.

I'm really happy to be now.

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> I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.

I'm not sure how that happened - in DOS you could copy things to the framebuffer. There were libraries like Allegro which came with a million features including sound/UI/sprite rendering/animation/effects etc. out of the box.

But anyways copying a sprite to a screen is not hard even if you don't use a single piece of foreign code - you can read in a BMP file and just copy it row-by-row to the screen.

I'm talking about things that were long before DOS even existed.

At that time you didn't even have the tools to cut sprites from image in the first place. That's why it took a lot of time (and I was 12 years old and my dad was pretty far away from an engineer, that didn't help).

were you trying to say you've been coding *for* 40 years? that "old" in "40 years old" confuses me a lot

or are you 60 years of age now, starting at 40 and have been coding long enough to see editors progress?

I'm pretty sure they are not a native English speaker. Many languages use 'since 40 years' to mean what we say as 'for 40 years'.

Or maybe "since <<I was>> 40 years old"?

I think it’s an unfortunate typo…”old” => “ago”?

yeah, typed too fast. I was talking about 40 years ago. Apple 2+ to be specific.

I'm 53, started at 10. At that time, being able to edit a line of code without re-typing it completely was "cool" :-) Then, on apple 2, we had GPLE (global program line editor) then Assembler toolkit which had an editor. Then I moved to PC. First I used GWBasic (it had an editor) then Turbo Pascal, then multi-edit, then emacs, then Visual Studio, then Eclipse, then Word (became a manager :-)), then back to emacs and VSCode (coding again!) and a bit of Kate.

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