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I didn't start programming until Google was in full swing - what I'd like to know is how much Google search 'changed the game' for learning programming language

by Tycho 16y ago

I didn't start programming until Google was in full swing - what I'd like to know is how much Google search 'changed the game' for learning programming languages. If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly. Before the Google age, I suppose you'd have to read documentation much more thoroughly and build up fluency in order to get anything done. Has Google search and other web resources changed daily programming drastically?

mbreese 16y ago
I'm not sure it was Google as much as the web in general (+Google). When I started coding in the mid 90's, if there was a topic I wanted to learn about, I needed to find a book about it. From there, I could walk though the book, skip the parts I already knew, and after reading the examples in the book, I'd have a pretty good idea and I could go off and write my code. Doing this, I accumulated a pretty large collection of (mainly O'Reilly) books. Now, you just do a Google search for a topic, and you're flooded with examples and people explaining how to do X in Y. My book collection stopped growing in about 2003. That's not even covering error messages and APIs... being able to Google a specific error message is wonderful. And I couldn't imagine coding again without immediate access to the language APIs online.
smackfu 16y ago
You had an O'Reilly bookshelf.
raganwald 16y ago
Great question, however this caught my eye If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly. Very true, however this only works for languages that are just like the languages you already know. So taking a mythical enterprise programmer (no hate mail, please!), he can google for "How do I implement a for loop in Scheme" and get an answer, but of course he may entirely miss the fact that tail recursion is optimized by default and that the idiomatic way to solve his problem would be to write a recursive function. For this reason, I hope that when Googling things, people take the extra step of just plain reading words. Lots of words. Blog posts, books (online or dead trees), rants in forums, everything. The limitation of asking a question (whether in Google or StackOverflow or whatever) is that when learning a new way to think about programming, you don't know what question to ask.
- nkassis 16y ago
  That extremely true, which is why I recommend not learning by Google as a default. Knowing what question to ask implies knowing things that relate to the issue. The best way in my view to learn those related things is usually in a good book about the subject. I fail to see blogs/stack overflow/google ever beating a good book about a subject.
  - noglorp 16y ago
    I grew up with 'learn by Googling' as my most used educational tool. It would have been wonderful if it didn't take so much time to sift through the endless misinformation, but doing so really leads to a pretty deep coverage of a topic. "Learning by Google" also often meant "Learning by perldoc" by proxy, or "Learning by O'Reilly e-books", etc. The real difficulty comes to when a subject is obscured by prominent shitty resourcess (Google, please blacklist w3schools.com, and please make the ACTUAL SPECS always turn up as the first result).

by Tycho 16y ago

mbreese 16y ago

I'm not sure it was Google as much as the web in general (+Google). When I started coding in the mid 90's, if there was a topic I wanted to learn about, I needed to find a book about it. From there, I could walk though the book, skip the parts I already knew, and after reading the examples in the book, I'd have a pretty good idea and I could go off and write my code. Doing this, I accumulated a pretty large collection of (mainly O'Reilly) books. Now, you just do a Google search for a topic, and you're flooded with examples and people explaining how to do X in Y. My book collection stopped growing in about 2003. That's not even covering error messages and APIs... being able to Google a specific error message is wonderful. And I couldn't imagine coding again without immediate access to the language APIs online.

smackfu 16y ago

You had an O'Reilly bookshelf.

raganwald 16y ago

Great question, however this caught my eye If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly. Very true, however this only works for languages that are just like the languages you already know. So taking a mythical enterprise programmer (no hate mail, please!), he can google for "How do I implement a for loop in Scheme" and get an answer, but of course he may entirely miss the fact that tail recursion is optimized by default and that the idiomatic way to solve his problem would be to write a recursive function. For this reason, I hope that when Googling things, people take the extra step of just plain reading words. Lots of words. Blog posts, books (online or dead trees), rants in forums, everything. The limitation of asking a question (whether in Google or StackOverflow or whatever) is that when learning a new way to think about programming, you don't know what question to ask.

nkassis 16y ago
That extremely true, which is why I recommend not learning by Google as a default. Knowing what question to ask implies knowing things that relate to the issue. The best way in my view to learn those related things is usually in a good book about the subject. I fail to see blogs/stack overflow/google ever beating a good book about a subject.
- noglorp 16y ago
  I grew up with 'learn by Googling' as my most used educational tool. It would have been wonderful if it didn't take so much time to sift through the endless misinformation, but doing so really leads to a pretty deep coverage of a topic. "Learning by Google" also often meant "Learning by perldoc" by proxy, or "Learning by O'Reilly e-books", etc. The real difficulty comes to when a subject is obscured by prominent shitty resourcess (Google, please blacklist w3schools.com, and please make the ACTUAL SPECS always turn up as the first result).