News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips. Parent comment

Re:John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridma... by 62951413 on Saturday August 13, 2022 @03:33PM (#32453028)
On the flip side, if only had the teenage me had a computer at home my last year in school. Or more than a single book on Turbo Pascal (with OO support in v5.5!) I was reading again and again. Forget about the Internet, had the college-age me had access to just Wikipedia :(

It's _really_ painful to remember how scarce information was in the early 90s and how prohibitively expensive the hardware. I guess it was a better filter when only the people who really loved computers were getting into the industry though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridma... by zmmmmm on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:13AM (#32457165)
> It's _really_ painful to remember how scarce information was in the early 90s

I think that scarcity of information has helped me quite a lot. I often see others giving up on problems where they lack sufficient information, but I have an ingrained ability to sniff out the information - whether it's reverse engineering, gleaning subtle hints from what is available in the documentation I do have or just "thinking like the computer" to intuit things, I can very often make headway where others have failed.

[ Parent | on HN ]