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Perhaps I should've been clearer in the article, but it's aimed at people learning to program. Absolutely, as a professional, use the tools available to be as

• paulmd 10y ago
  If you don't know what "static" means then sure, that's a good thing to learn because it's an important concept to understand how the code will behave. But a lot of programming stuff is either syntax or just convention/The Way It's Done. Why is it static void main(argc, argv) in Java? Well, that's the way C did it. Why did C give main() function arguments, as opposed to (say) environment variables? Well, that's just the way it's done. Why is return 0 success and other values fail? Convention. Why are curly braces used to delimit code and parentheses used to delimit arguments? Because the spec authors said so. Basically, I think most of what constitutes programming can be done without ever typing a line of code. It's the process of decomposing a large task into small, simple ones, in a way that can be processed efficiently. The rest is just notation. Pedagogy is absolutely fine, but at the same time we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Nobody is writing their own TCP/IP stack, we all rely on "copied and pasted" code (encapsulated in a library) so that we can focus on business logic. Obviously if you don't know what you're doing you can easily cause a mess, but the physical act of typing is probably the least important part of programming. Conceptual understanding is what matters, and the random syntax and half dozen keyword modifiers you will learn by typing are not going to push you very far in conceptual understanding.