Yeah, those were the days. Learn to read input from the keyboard, display characters to the screen, and to read and save files and then you could do almost anything that any professional software did.
To add to that, you could learn to read/write a serial port and poll a mouse to find out where the pointer was and whether a button had been clicked, and that was cutting edge. At that point you were doing things that much commercial software didn't even do yet.
Just a few simple I/O things. All the rest was whatever logic you coded up.
You ran it and it either worked or didn't, and if it didn't you knew that was a bug in your code. Code that you knew because you'd written it.
No stack of components, no frameworks and libraries and dependency manager configurations and VMs and container configurations and network connections and other programs that might interact with it. It was just you and your code.
And sure, the IDEs today are technically better. But so much more complex that you could spend a lifetime studying them and still not understand all their functions. Turbo Pascal's IDE, though much simpler, well, was much simpler. You could easily grok it entirely within a week's normal usage.
So without all the cognitive overhead of a modern code ecosystem, you could just focus fully on solving the problem, doing the logic, figuring out the best way to do it.
Nowadays you spend most of your time figuring out all the tools and dependencies and configurations and systems and how to glue them all together and get them actually working together properly. There's relatively little time left for the actual problem you're trying to solve and the actual code that you're writing. Actually doing the thing that achieves the objective is kind of just an afterthought done in your spare time when you're not busy babysitting the ecosystem.
Well said.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" parable kind of applies here. Almost no one wants to openly say how ridiculous the situation has become, for fear of being discredited by others with an axe to grind [1], or by those who just do not get the point, or by those who are into unnecessary/accidental complexity or RDD (Resume-Driven Development). A sad state of affairs, more so since it is among a group who think of themselves as, and claim to be, smarter than "normals". Even that last word is ugh, and revealing of the mentality.
To add to that, you could learn to read/write a serial port and poll a mouse to find out where the pointer was and whether a button had been clicked, and that was cutting edge. At that point you were doing things that much commercial software didn't even do yet.
Just a few simple I/O things. All the rest was whatever logic you coded up.
You ran it and it either worked or didn't, and if it didn't you knew that was a bug in your code. Code that you knew because you'd written it.
No stack of components, no frameworks and libraries and dependency manager configurations and VMs and container configurations and network connections and other programs that might interact with it. It was just you and your code.
And sure, the IDEs today are technically better. But so much more complex that you could spend a lifetime studying them and still not understand all their functions. Turbo Pascal's IDE, though much simpler, well, was much simpler. You could easily grok it entirely within a week's normal usage.
So without all the cognitive overhead of a modern code ecosystem, you could just focus fully on solving the problem, doing the logic, figuring out the best way to do it.
Nowadays you spend most of your time figuring out all the tools and dependencies and configurations and systems and how to glue them all together and get them actually working together properly. There's relatively little time left for the actual problem you're trying to solve and the actual code that you're writing. Actually doing the thing that achieves the objective is kind of just an afterthought done in your spare time when you're not busy babysitting the ecosystem.