> I learned to code in isolation on QB back in the day - having interactive help right in the IDE was amazing in my pre-internet days.
Hah, same for me. I had no peers who knew programming, only a buddy who mentioned QBasic after I stumbled upon a small BASIC program in a magazine.
I'd spend evenings just going through each successive keyword in the help, trying to figure out what they meant. Didn't help that we only started learning English in school at age 12, so lots of words I didn't understand at age 13.
On the positive side, I think this is what made me so good at reading and understanding documentation, a skill that's been incredibly valuable for me since.
I worked my way through a printed manual for GW-BASIC alphabetically, with no idea why the graphics keywords all failed until I got to SCREEN to change video modes!
Haha I love this! Brings back memories of learning stuff by trial and error. I remember poking around in DLL files with a text editor and trying to find ways to call the function names I could see inside them… never did succeed at that haha
Hah, same for me. I had no peers who knew programming, only a buddy who mentioned QBasic after I stumbled upon a small BASIC program in a magazine.
I'd spend evenings just going through each successive keyword in the help, trying to figure out what they meant. Didn't help that we only started learning English in school at age 12, so lots of words I didn't understand at age 13.
On the positive side, I think this is what made me so good at reading and understanding documentation, a skill that's been incredibly valuable for me since.