Yesterday, I tried to code without googling to see how far I can go. After 20 minutes of coding I run into a problem. I just couldn't make my angularjs app to work with ASP.Net MVC antiforgerytoken. I tried my best to solve it but no luck.

After 2 hours I finally gave up and connect my laptop to network and search for answer, within a few seconds. Google give my this link: http://ojdevelops.com/2016/01/....

After only few minutes I finally make my code to work. And I realized that there is no way I can figure this things out using only my head. I still need the help of community to get things done.

So my question is. During the 80's and 90's how did the old programmers get themselves unstuck when problem like this arrive?

With great difficulty, or with fluent knowledge of their programming languagrs.

@Ellis That and books. Lots and lots of books.

My old man is one of those old school programmers, from back then when CS were called systems and communications engineering.

He told me things were harder but simpler at the same time, back then there were no fancy frameworks, no internet but also there weren't so many platforms to give support to, scripting languages didn't had such a widespread use and if you ran into a problem you had those pesky big ass manuals and if not it was time to hack your way through things.

I wouldn't say they were better, they definitely were more proactive and not as lazy as many millennial programmers but in those times you didn't have so many things on your plate (nowadays it seems you have many multiple plates all full of shit you need to know)

If you are trying to improve without feeling like you are cheering I recommend you try to solve your problems through the official docs only, like they did.

This reminds me of the time I was put in jail for 3 months and found some books on a graphing library for C. Oddly enough you’d only find this in Silicon Valley county jail complexes.

I tried learning C by reading the syntax for the library. It’s a strengthening exercise, of course, and albeit without a compiler to test my theories on how it would work if I wrote it this way in my head. I also had relatives send me socket code to learn bind, accept, etc..

It was an awesome experience. I also gained 15 lbs of muscle! And had a blast making spreads with my fellow inmates.

When I got out, I definitely had some fun with the computer...

Put yourself through the extreme and you’ll come out with a lot!

It was great to see the bind() method requiring struct sockaddr_in and being like “??” then going to the graphing library book and seeing how to define a struct through their examples. I loved it. I still remember the whole experience even if it was 6 years ago!

First, we had books. Second, there were computer magazines - back then also with programming stuff. Third, we didn't have Angular-JS apps with ASP.Net MVC anti forgery tokens.

I've been reading a lot of GNU source code lately and dear God they do the most complex things for simple tasks!

Idk if it does more than I think or C89 was still newish and that, or a lack of stack overflow but dear God! I hate to imagine being the one to write those tools, or really anything without Google.

I find myself writing code in C without requiring internet, manual or anything. For newer languages I use, like R, Python, I need to consult the Internet. The difference is I've learned C in a more formal way in university and we were given many useless exercises on specific features. Which develops in-depth knowledge of the language.

Next there's the help and manual offline, which kind of solve most of the problems.

I was trained to write any code first on a paper with a pen, dry run it, and when confident, type it in. This I think helps with patience and helps me get more confidence and less logical errors.

Finally, unit test all modules and some basic integration testing.

Given these as the basis, I think have helped me handle and write code in an enterprise scale.

I think this may also apply for the older days. Right now, I can't do fancy things or fix strange errors in Python, R. I hope I can soon I can invest time on these like I did in C and C++ 😂.