27 Feb
2023
27 Feb
'23
9:46 p.m.
I see the wisdom in your last line there, I've typed and deleted a response to this
email 4 times, each one more convoluted than the last.
The short of my stance though is, as a younger programmer (29), I am certainly not a fan
of these trends that are all too common in my generation. That said, I've set foot
in one single softare-related class in my life (highschool Java class) and so I don't
really know what is being taught to folks going the traditional routes. All I know from
my one abortive semester of college is that I didn't see a whole lot of reliance on
individual exploration of concepts in classes, just everyone working to a
one-size-fits-all understanding of how to be a good employee in a given subject area. Of
course, this is also influenced by my philosophy and biases and such, and only represents
4-5 months of observation, but if my minimal experience with college is to be believed, I
have little faith that educational programs are producing much more than meat filters
between StackOverflow and <insert code editor here>. No offense to said meat
filters, people gotta work, but there is something lost when the constant march of
production torpedoes individual creativity. Then again, do big firms want sophisticated
engineers or are we too far gone into assembly line programming with no personal
connection to any of the products? I'm glad I'm as personally involved in the
stuff I work with, I could see myself slipping into the same patterns of apathy if I was a
nameless face in a sea of coders on some project I don't even know the legal name of
any given day.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:22 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com <arnold(a)skeeve.com>
wrote:
Chet Ramey chet.ramey(a)case.edu wrote:
On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Yeah, really.
I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most
don't even understand that they're missing something, or that
they could learn it if they wanted to.
I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-)
Arnold IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they
cut & paste to the
almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion
would be faster.
Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web
and barely understand, if at all.