Manuals. Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively. From there you wade into existing code bases, learn by maintaining the work of others, and eventually you originate new work. Along the way you dog-eared the manuals.
The Internet has obviated the need for comprehensive books for the bulk of contemporary programming. I suppose there are obscure enough and/or proprietary platforms that still follow the "comprehensive documentation" approach, but it seems it's possible for widely used tooling to be poorly documented and rely on online forums to fill in the gaps with crowd sourced answers and examples. This makes "mind share" crucial to the usability of a language/platform.
I am sometimes frustrated with the contemporary model, but the old way wasn't a panacea either; just broken differently. If you want a good taste of "what it was like" find the manuals for Turbo C++ 3.0 (1991.) You'll learn things about C/C++ that you've never seen written down anywhere.
> Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively.
Often, three or more books: commonly a library reference (which was just what it says, but with a lot more detail than many packages today have with their low-effort, auto-generated API docs), a programmer's guide (a comprehensive guide to the language supported), and a user's guide (a guide to the tooling provided.)
The web has made finding answers to hard questions quite a bit easier, but it's also made the basics quite a bit harder. Current (to the software version you are using), correct, and clear information covering the majority of things most people would use was a lot easier to find when getting a compiler meant getting books with exactly that information.
Note that, FWIW, Free Pascal today comes with the same manuals - a user's guide (telling you how to install and use the compiler, the IDE and the various tools), a programmer's guide (telling you implementation details for the language), a language reference (explaining the language itself, in theory you can make your own compiler from that), a runtime library reference (what the name implies) and a framework reference (reference for the extra libraries that usually come with FPC). Also there is a reference for the documentation generator in case you need to write docs yourself.
I started with PHP3, and spend so much time ready the manual. It was/is pretty good, well written and the comments can be pretty helpful.
Most programming language have manuals, and at least those I've used have been pretty good. People just don't want to read manuals, they just want the answer to their current problem.
The Internet has obviated the need for comprehensive books for the bulk of contemporary programming. I suppose there are obscure enough and/or proprietary platforms that still follow the "comprehensive documentation" approach, but it seems it's possible for widely used tooling to be poorly documented and rely on online forums to fill in the gaps with crowd sourced answers and examples. This makes "mind share" crucial to the usability of a language/platform.
I am sometimes frustrated with the contemporary model, but the old way wasn't a panacea either; just broken differently. If you want a good taste of "what it was like" find the manuals for Turbo C++ 3.0 (1991.) You'll learn things about C/C++ that you've never seen written down anywhere.