Took a trip to the public library and their coding setup blew my mind

I went to the downtown branch in Portland last weekend to finally get some quiet time to work through a Python tutorial. I walked into their computer lab and saw they had these old monitors with like 3 different operating systems boot options, and one guy next to me was coding in BASIC on a terminal from the 90s. It honestly made me laugh because here I am struggling with VS Code on my laptop and this guy is writing loops on something that looks like a museum piece. Has anyone else found weird old tech setups that actually helped them learn better than modern stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugotaylor10d ago

Funny you say that but I actually think modern stuff gets in the way way more than it helps. All that VS Code auto-complete and syntax highlighting just means you never actually learn what the code is doing under the hood. When I first started coding I used a really bare bones text editor with no colors or anything and it forced me to actually memorize commands and debug by just reading my code line by line. That old BASIC guy probably understands computing fundamentals way better than any of us with our fancy tools. Why would you want a computer doing half your thinking for you when you're trying to learn how to think like a programmer in the first place? Wouldn't you rather struggle through it and actually get it than have the machine rescue you from every mistake?

ericcraig10d ago

Look I get what you're saying but that's not really how memory works with programming. Using a bare bones editor doesn't make you memorize commands, it just makes you slow and frustrated. The actual thinking part is about logic and problem solving, not remembering syntax. I've seen guys who can write perfect C without autocomplete still write terrible code because they don't understand how to structure a loop properly. The tools are just tools, they don't do the thinking for you any more than a calculator does math for you.