-2 karma · joined January 14, 2020
In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade.
I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of context-sensitive help. These days, development is mostly fragmented and half-working. Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.
Also, eventually coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine to do Star Trek-like self-programming. Essentially all office jobs are vulnerable to elimination as mechanical machine operators.