alt Hacker NewsI've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays.
We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download.
I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.
And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking...
And now we've got Claude.
I'm really happy to be now.
Replies
were you trying to say you've been coding *for* 40 years? that "old" in "40 years old" confuses me a lot
or are you 60 years of age now, starting at 40 and have been coding long enough to see editors progress?
> I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.
I'm not sure how that happened - in DOS you could copy things to the framebuffer. There were libraries like Allegro which came with a million features including sound/UI/sprite rendering/animation/effects etc. out of the box.
But anyways copying a sprite to a screen is not hard even if you don't use a single piece of foreign code - you can read in a BMP file and just copy it row-by-row to the screen.