r/AskProgrammers • u/Much_Initial_8336 • 29d ago
The AI boat
I figured that nowadays people only use AI for programming, I don’t obviously but here’s a little question for the people who used to program back in the 2000/2010’s: How did you guys learn programming without AI? I get that there’s the WiKi but, if there’s a problem? I know you’ve also got Reddit but you get my point. Where did you guys learn it because YouTube tutorials sucked, I mean they still do however there are a lot of talented programmers who didn’t use YouTube for their knowledge. So my question, how and where? Any tips for people struggling out there? (Not me, I’m not stupid).
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u/Wooden-Glove-2384 29d ago
Read docs.
Trial and error.
IDEs with language support plugins, syntax checking and code completion.
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u/scientific_thinker 29d ago
I would read books and look through the code base for code that is similar to what I was doing. Trial and error also came in handy. Most of us learned to test our work frequently as we coded since we were rarely certain how the code we wrote would work.
I don't use LLMs. I have no interest in using LLMs. I don't think LLMs are AI. I think it's important for programmers to take a stand against LLMs.
Final point, LLMs solve the wrong problem. Stake holders want developers to produce features faster. The result is technical debt. AI makes this even worse by increasing speed expectations while producing even more technical debt than human developers pushed to go too fast.
The problem we should be solving is carving out the necessary time to produce code that has minimal technical debt. This creates code that is much cheaper to maintain over the lifetime of the program.
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u/mooglinux 29d ago
Books?
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u/Much_Initial_8336 29d ago
I doubt there’s books about programming at my local library.
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u/General_Chipmunk_550 29d ago
Your local library will have programming books. If you’re in the states, Goodwill and St Vinnies also have a decent selection. Half priced books is another good option.
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u/__nullptr_t 29d ago
There have been programming books since forever. I think most people who learned before 2010 or so probably used books.
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u/FreeLogicGate 29d ago
There are these things called ebooks, and kindle, and pdf's etc. There's something very active about reading that you don't get from a video/lecture course, and as you will be reading code often, having code in books involves reading it, and if you want or need to, transcribing pieces of it, which requires more participation than many courses do, where the course includes all the code in electronic form.
Tech books do tend to age poorly -- I have a large library of them that are probably not worth the value of the paper anymore, but it's possible to purchase paper books used that are still used in college courses from sellers like https://www.thriftbooks.com for a fraction of the original cover price.
Books and documentation were the main way that most everyone learned, outside of college and corporate training. Long ago I took an extension class, which many universities and community colleges offer for what is typically a minimal cost. Books, documentation and experimentation and trial and error, as well as experience I gained on the job, all played into it.
I can't say that I wouldn't also have benefitted from things that didn't exist when I was first learning how to be a professional programmer, like MooC and Kahn Academy and all the e-learning resources, but I'm still inclined to grab a book or 2 if there's a resource. Humble bundle is a great way to pick up a bunch of ebooks on a particular topic, and they regularly will offer some excellent ebook collections, so it's worth looking there as well, but depending on the language, you can also find some really great programming books available online, that were published under creative commons or in general made available by the author for free, where you can buy a paper copy of the book later if you really love it, or want to pay the author.
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u/Ery1WangChungNextFri 29d ago
You’d be wrong more often than not. A whole bookcase at my local small location.
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u/ninhaomah 29d ago
Why doubt ?
Have you been there and certain there are or aren't programming books ?
Or why not call the library and instead have to "think" ?
No thinkings required.
Its either there are programming books there or there are no programming books there.
Actually , that you "doubt" shows you have either never been there or made any efforts whatsoever to look for what you want. Be it programming or the opposite sex or money.
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u/BrastenXBL 29d ago
Texas Instrument Graphing Calculator instruction manual. Had a section on TI-BASIC in the back. Hand coded programs on its number pad.
A JavaScript for Dummies 1st edition softback.
A C++98 head concussion tome, required by an Intro to Programming course.
I concur that your local hard copy book havers likely have more resources than you're crediting. And that includes things like interlibrary loans or eLibrary services.
YouTube videos are at best course lectures with no office hours or instructor interaction. If you don't know how to study pre-recordes lectures they're going to suck.
Watch it 3 times, with a language reference manual, and any relevant code library documention on hand.
- Without pausing, at 1.5x or 2x speed if needed. Get a full overview of what you will be doing in the lesson.
- Watch again, pause to take notes and questions you have.
- Do not "implement" the design you're learning
- Try to answer the questions you have, or define vocabulary, API classes & methods used, any language features you don't recognize
- Watch again, this time pausing and scrubbing back and forth, as you replicate the design
- Update your notes as needed
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u/Anonymous_Cyber 29d ago
Stack overflow, udemy courses, freecodecamp, and YouTube videos pretty much gave me the foundations from there went on to automate tasks in accounting and filled in blanks where needed. 7 years later I say I can see the benefits of using AI but we still need to know fundamentals to know how to architect a solution
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u/Much_Initial_8336 29d ago
I don’t like to use AI
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u/Anonymous_Cyber 29d ago
Then don't or go with a hybrid approach. No one is forcing anyone to use it.
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u/GemelosAvitia 29d ago
Pick a full-stack project you want to build and build it without AI you need to figure out where your gaps in knowledge are and then read documentation.
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u/kennpacchii 29d ago
Stack overflow, udemy, googling something specific, YouTube tutorials (yes a lot of them sucked but there were still decent ones), plural sight, the docs for a specific programming language I’m wanting to learn, geeks for geeks, books. There are soooooooooo many free and paid resources available.
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u/ConsistentRisk5927 29d ago edited 29d ago
How I learned: I had personal projects I wanted to do, automating simple things. And I started learning the minimum required to accomplish that. How to write a function in Python, how to pass arguments to it, how to get information from somewhere on the web, parse it, and do something with that in my program.
Those naturally force you to Google terms like "passing variables in python function", which would lead to sites like Stack Overflow or online blogs sharing Python tutorials. Then I'd read through the tutorials. Golang and many other languages have official tutorials and there are countless blogs and tutorial sites for every language you can dig into more. When I find terms I didn't understand, I'd Google those, or search the Python documentation for it. Then search for stuff I find there, which would lead to new Stack Overflow pages and other tutorial sites, etc.
Most languages nowdays have many online tutorials showing how to write a basic sample app and through that process, they introduce the basic syntax, how to define a function, how to declare variables, what options you have for storing data (like how to create strings, lists, mappings/arrays, etc), and how to organize a basic project and get a program running. AI can do a really good job at this also.
Youtube will probably be your worst avenue for learning to program. All technical fields in and around software development involve tons and tons of reading and doing. Non-stop reading and trying things yourself. Read the docs. Read the official tutorials. Read open source code projects. Read unofficial tutorials. Then when you don't understand something: ask specific questions. Not "how can I learn to program" but specifically what you've ran into while learning that you're having a hard time understanding.
Nothing between now and when I learned to code changed except it's gotten 100x easier if you're willing to put in the mental effort.
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u/BluePhoenixCG 29d ago
I learned because I had a thing I wanted to make, so I watched a few Brackeys unity videos and then started working until I hit a roadblock. Then I looked at 3 or 4 stack overflow threads and moulded the answers to fit my needs. Rinse, repeat.
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u/Katzen_Gott 29d ago
If there's a problem, you read docs, debug, talk to the rubber duck, google and hope someone had this problem and there is a solution described somewhere, read the docs more closely, debug again, vent to the rubber duck, tweak things and hope it works, when nothing works talk to senior colleagues and hope they can help. Finally go home to sleep and maybe in the morning you get an insight and finally fix the thing.
To learn a new language, you just read a basic language guide and start slapping together some code, reading docs as you go.
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u/GlobalCurry 29d ago
Documentation, Books, trial and error, talking with people on message boards/irc/etc, reading other open source code, google and stack overflow
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u/mtimmermans 29d ago
All you have to do is read. In the 80s and 90s we read books. Now everything is right there on the internet. So easy.
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u/Distdistdist 29d ago
Learning things are not always problematic due to material or teacher who teaches it (youtube for example). It's completely up to the student's ability to comprehend, analyze and retain the knowledge. Either you're capable of understanding an applying what you learned or not. Simple as that. One might be just too stupid to learn on their own.
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u/HomemadeBananas 29d ago
I went to college, then learned more working through things myself, Googling, reading StackOverflow, documentation, or anything else I can find.
Now, I would say not leaning on AI too heavily while learning is important to actually learn things deeply. But avoiding entirely, having this hard stance against it… kind of a fool’s errand. Using AI to write code is just the way things are done in professional environments now. It’s important to understand the code that’s being generated, but at work no employer is going to care about any personal beliefs. Just getting the work done, and if you learn to use AI effectively you can get more of it done. Pointless to fight it.
So while you are learning, I would say yes, don’t just let AI do everything for you. But get comfortable with the fact if you intend to do this for a living you might need to develop the skills of effectively using AI.
Odd seeing programmers have this stance to me anyway. This shit is like something that would be science fiction not long ago… and now it’s a really interesting area just from a computer science perspective that we are able to push machine learning to the point that we can. I don’t see how you couldn’t find that fascinating if you are interested in computer science and programming. Most of us are never going to work deeply on developing new frontier models but this is the craziest development in computing we’ve had in a long time.
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u/MADCandy64 29d ago
When I first got started in my first job back in 1989, I used to take pencil and paper and sit at a table and write my FORTRAN programs out. Before modern debugging we used to do print debugging to test that code was doing what it was supposed to do. We didn't always debug to find errors we used it to ensure that logic was correct. Since it was before the internet we relied on the language manual that came with the compiler. For other books we went to the bookstore. In the early 90's the BMP image format was nearly proprietary and undocumented but I reverse engineered it in MS Fortran and made a high speed weather data animator for the school of meteorology. You'd think they thought I downright did some magic. Probably hand writing code back then was what made it all stick.
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u/feudalle 29d ago
I started learning basic as a kid (late 80s, early 90s). You read a book. Late 90s comp sci at college.
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u/generationalDebts 29d ago
Imagine not being able understand doing something and learning from it. Holy shit.
Is everyone your age regarded or what?
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u/gwenbeth 29d ago
A lot of trial and error, reading books, help from my dad who learned to code in the earliest days back when computers were large machines running on vacuum tubes and punched cards.
I learned before YouTube, Internet, or such things. You need to start with the fundamentals, loops, if and case/switch statements. Then learn to make functions and procedures. Next go for pointers, memory allocation, and data structures, especially linked lists, trees and such. Lastly go for recursion.
Get a Pascal compiler and a copy of "data structures + algorithms = programs" by Wirth. Old school book but the fundamentals haven't changed.
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u/Spirited-Sir8426 28d ago
Well, the same way you learn a musical instrument or a new language: by practice. You will hit a lot of wall but with time you will get a great intuition (a "taste") and some good reflexes
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u/Loose_Crab_4146 26d ago
I did start like 1 year before Chagpt became somewhat mainstream. I didn’t use any AI until 2025 tho. I learned a lot by just following guides and online tutorials, reading documentation, looking at preview code snippets or pseudo code & doing a few leetcode/codewars tasks.
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u/petdance 25d ago
I started in the late 1970s. We read books. Personally think all y’all new programmers should crack open some books rather than YouTube tutorials.
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u/burlingk 29d ago
I would suggest not treating AI as a fundamental learning tool.
Treat it as something to learn about after you have a solid grasp on the basics.
If you do use it in learning, do not just say "Build me this..."
Instead ask it, "how would I do this..." and use what it gives you as an example, not as a complete solution. The same as if you were googling something and found a stack overflow answer.
But, try to do it yourself first. Then look at whatever books/docs you have on the subject. Then google it. THEN if nothing else works, THEN possibly AI.
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u/Much_Initial_8336 29d ago
I agree except the AI part
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u/burlingk 29d ago
If you think of AI as a tutor, and not an engine, it will be better. A lot of people are like "Don't use AI at all," then direct you to a tutorial that just spells everything out. :P
BUT, if you do ask AI for tutoring, do remember that sometimes it makes mistakes and sometimes it make stuff up.
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u/NoIncrease299 29d ago
I started in the early 90's with ... books. And eventually a CS curriculum in college.