>What follows is not a slight on these people, who were all motivated, intelligent, and capable. It is a slight on the world of programming in the current ages, if you are seeking to get started with putting a general-purpose computer to your own purposes and merely own a general-purpose computer.<p>Why must programmers do anything to make outsiders more comfortable? What are architects doing to make blueprints easier to read (can you tell i know nothing about architects)? What are doctors doing to break down barriers (15 years of education/training)to the medical field?<p>Why is the experience of discomfort evidence of some problem in the field and not evidence of weakness and mismatched skills?<p>There's a group of people who learned how do program as children by themselves, and there is a group of adults who can't learn to code even with access to limitless information. Somehow the failure to learn isn't their fault.
It is <i>excruciatingly</i> hard to make a living out from programming and that <i>while staying honest</i>, because planned obsolescence is EVERYWHERE in software (and a bit in the hardware).<p>The only way I found: assembly with a conservative usage of the macro preprocessor. Since risc-v is not there yet (and it may fail), I still code super simple C code but I try hard to care for this code to compile NOT only with gcc and force myself to use tcc, cproc, scc, etc: only compile-time function tables coupled with runtime function tables, with preprocessor namespaces (if a project decides to grow to very large).<p>YES, it means additional upfront work, and other assembly ports if required. Only for pertinent ISAs though, the other ISAs get a "reference" implementation in simple C (and I mean _really_ simple and brutal): open source communities on the long run can do that fingers in the nose, corpos, not so sure...
It was already vastly more complex to start programming in Windows 95 era than in Commodore 64 era..<p>It's not really become that much easier since '95, the sheer amount of documentation and resources online is detrimental to the process..<p>After all, if all you have is one book and one compiler, you'll at least get to the point where you start to program..