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Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and o

Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of context-sensitive help. These days, development is mostly fragmented and half-working. Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again. Also, eventually coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine to do Star Trek-like self-programming. Essentially all office jobs are vulnerable to elimination as mechanical machine operators.

krembo 7y ago
"Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders." +1 for this
arghwhat 7y ago
I would argue that StackOverflow itself is not a problem—it is instead the laziness of many in the "newer" generations of programmers. StackOverflow has many great explanations, which are no different than reading a chapter in a book (it's just a book that is extremely relevant to you problem). The problem is that lazy people demand code dumps, and lazy people provide code dumps instead of explanations. This then becomes a feedback loop as people get used to this degree of laziness. This is especially rampant for Web topics, and to some extend also a counter-argument to the Borland help pages with examples: When presented with a fully written solution, people will blindly copy it and only do the minimum amount of work to make it run.
- kungito 7y ago
  I believe if nothing else then it's the fact that there are more programmers meaning less hardcore people who just want to get shit done and move on
  - kuzimoto 7y ago
    I think this is accurate. I'm pretty technical but with no formal education on programming. Currently I can only tinker with programming in my free time. There are a lot of huge gaps in my knowledge and it sucks sometimes, but at least Stack Overflow allows me to solve certain problems more easily, so I can get on with doing fun stuff.
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    Regardless of trade, I never approve of this mentality as the "shit" rarely gets done responsibly or sufficiently, as that cannot be done without fully understanding at least the chosen implementation. Perfectionism is not required, and can get in the way of professionalism. This is about a minimum amount of responsibility. (Learning is different though.)
twodave 7y ago
I don’t really blame StackOverflow here. We are living in an age where there are exponentially more people attempting to program than their used to be, and with lots of different motivations. Many of those people just aren’t capable or interested in being experts. The problem as I see it isn’t that this situation exists, but that those workers still command such high salaries. We aren’t nearly as close as you suggest do the level of code generation that would replace the bottom quarter of the labor pool even, but if that day ever comes I believe it will be really profitable for the top 20-30%.
pjc50 7y ago
Speaking as someone who learned in the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C era, StackOverflow has moved the state of the art on hugely, and people's dependency on it is more a symptom of the environements they are working in than anything else. > Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again. The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDOS environment was not a moving target and had no security considerations. The world is very different now; we do so much programming in the browser because it's the one single cross-platform zero-friction environment we have. But those reasons also make it a battleground between platform monopolists. There is also so much more software. Part of the problem that Stackoverflow solves is dealing with this. You can't be an expert on everything, there isn't enough time and it moves too fast. So you need a quick solution to incidental problems so you can get back to the "core" problem. (credentials: the code I wrote at age sixteen for doing 3D rendering https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc )
- cr0sh 7y ago
  Interesting code and fairly readable; I liked the simple scripting system, and there were a few comments and examples, and yes - double buffering of the Mode 13h screen (though the memory allocation seemed weird, but maybe there was a good reason for that). Certainly better written code than what I was writing at 16, mainly in BASIC and assembler at the time (was a fan of the Lee Adams series of 3D programming books). Affordable C compilers (for a teenager at least) were not really a thing at the time (IIRC, even the DOS stuff, if you owned such a machine which I did not, still cost a couple hundred dollars around 1989-90-ish). I didn't manage to get a C compiler until the mid-90s when I picked up a copy of Turbo C for DOS, but I still think I paid $100 for the privilege.
- bitwize 7y ago
  > browser > zero-friction environment Giggle.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    If you know another way I can deploy code instantly on everything from PCs to phones to televisions without even having to sign anything, pay anything, or get approval, I'm all ears.
jmull 7y ago
The stackoverflow just makes it easy to look up trivia. The internet in general makes it easy to look up answers to simple problems. That leaves more time for the interesting problems. I think that makes programmers generally smarter than before. They start from a higher base and can climb more quickly. Also, you’re overestimating the potential trajectory of current approaches to AI.
aNoob7000 7y ago
Since the early days of my career, people keep predicting the demise of the programmer. I remember CASE tools, and then Microsoft with VB were signs of the end. Roll forward 30+ years in IT, and complexity keeps going up, and programmers are still needed. Maybe I'm just old, but I'm probably going to retire, and AI is not going to replace any programmers. From what I see, the quality of the software in Corporate America reassures me that programmers will have jobs for many decades to come.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Visual Basic might be second to only PHP in the amount of terrible code it has allowed shadetree porogrammers to create.
  - justinclift 7y ago
    Are you not familiar with javascript?
    - zubairq 7y ago
      Yes you can write terrible code with my Visual basic clone in Javascript here instead: https://github.com/zubairq/pilot https://github.com/zubairq/pilot
  - arpa 7y ago
    What's a shadetree porogammer?
simonh 7y ago
One of the issues is people in general don't pay for dev tools anymore, and writing documentation is laborious. Borland could pay documentation authors to write extensive help and examples because they charged money, and sold a ton of licenses. Stack Overflow is simply crowd-sourcing the same thing. 'Eventually' is likely to be a very, very long time. I doubt we'll have self-programming systems like that even in my children's lifetime. It will likely take AGI to do it. There's the classic tale of programmers back in the 90s quiting their jobs because they thought Visual Basic would let non-technical bureaucrats write their own software, so there would be no need for specialist software engineers anymore. One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I'm not an AI denier. Eventually we will get AGI, I think it's inevitable. It's just that the time horizon is so far off it's not really worth worrying about. We don't even have a clue how to go about designing it's general operational parameters or architecture yet.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I have some minor-level experience with self-driving car software, algorithms, etc. The majority of this is from various MOOCs I have participated in over the years, as well as research papers, books, and other things I have read and consumed. In short, I am not an expert, but I am not unfamiliar with the technology, either. I personally think we'll never see actual widespread usage of self-driving vehicles outside of a very few narrow and carefully controlled (and regulated) cases. At least, I suspect, within my lifetime (which honestly, I'll be lucky for another 30 years or so). My reasoning is that people will only trust perfection when it comes to riding in a self-driving vehicle. They will only be willing to use one if they can be assured that it will Never Crash, or be crashed into. They have no problem driving a car themselves, or being surrounded by other people driving cars. They have no problem with those crashing and even killing people - maybe even themselves (though they tell themselves fairy tales of it-will-never-happen-to-me to soothe over the reality). But introduce a machine into the equation... ...and that machine has to be Perfect. It cannot make any mistakes. It must avoid issues and be Safe 100% of the time, no exceptions. In other words, people want the impossible from a machine, but will give utmost allowances to themselves and others as "humans". I think a lot of this has to do with assignment of blame. When they crash or are crashed into - there is someone to assign blame to; themselves, the other driver, etc. Someone they can yell at, figuratively or literally. A self-driving car? No one to yell at. No one to assign blame. Nothing that will feel bad for its error or failure to avoid something. People can't handle that. They don't want a self-driving vehicle that has a safety factor of say, "seven 9s" - it has to be 100% safe or nothing. Because even if it makes a mistake only once out of a million miles of driving, that is still not safe enough. They want the unobtainable - a perfect machine, a machine that will never fail. Nothing like that can or will ever exist (basic laws of thermodynamics prevent it, for one thing). Even though they themselves, or even the most professional of professional drivers - can't even come close to approaching this level. It both madness, and understandable at the same time.
blablabla123 7y ago
But StackOverflow helps only with basic to common intermediate problems. The most upvoted answers often resemble the most common beginner problems. So it indeed very much replaces the old paper/online help documentation, is often better written and more readily available. On the other hand for more difficult problems it's common to not get an answer. In fact the problem might be so specific that it's even against the SO rules. > coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine I was expecting this development with the rise of React since at least the visualization part has become completely declarative. It's no rocket science to automatically transform that, in fact being an XML dialect there are a lot of tools available for this. But still, even in 2020 people still make money with writing HTML/CSS either plain or within a CMS. In fact even a reverse development happened in some regard. In the 90s it was quite common for people to write CRUD apps running in Access, FoxPro etc. These tools - like Delphi which might be closest to that - practically disappeared. The analytical load is still there and cannot be abstracted away. The decline of Access etc. happened because many aspects couldn't be mapped. Not to speak of all the nitty gritty details needed to make applications run safely and maintainable. There's still a very long road ahead to automatize all that, especially in a way that it consumes only a reasonable amount of CPU, memory and storage...
austincheney 7y ago
I have been thinking the frustrations I am forming with writing software was due to an ever lowering barrier of entry. I never thought about mental laziness as a factor, but that explains the frustrations so much more clearly. My frustrations as HN comments: * Selective bias in candidate selection - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098101 * Low productivity environments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21965539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21965539 * False equivalence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904199 * There are only 2 APIs for working in the browser and yet most developers can't figure it out to save their careers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849398 * Invented Here stupidity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417450 * The DOM is a 20 year old standard that is the primary interface to any markup language and the primary interface when working in the browser, yet it is still somehow an arcane mystery of lost knowledge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069571 * More about hiring bias - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21015495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21015495 * Excessive sensitivity not found in other industries. I have heard that several psychologists are predicting my children's generation will be the most offensive generation as a counter to the extreme sensitivity (fragility) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668380 * More selective bias, online code tests. Now when I see online code tests without extremely specific grading criteria I instantly terminate the conversation. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605329
Accujack 7y ago
> general AI will allow non-programmers Sure... when general AI becomes available, flexible, and has solid usability for something like this. Which will be about the time that faster than light stardrives become common and our meals are materialized out of thin air on demand. Despite perceptions, the last few years' "AI boom" is mostly marketing. Advances in processor power have made deep learning algorithms practical outside lab settings, but we're not even close to a "generic AI" that can think as well as even a dog can. That's decades away at the earliest. Right now, we don't even understand how our own brains work.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
> Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. I don't think SO has dumbed down people. It's just the average level has tanked because of influx of people in tech. In 1980s average computer person was highly skilled, educated and intelligent, because even to get access to even the simplest computer required a solid dedication and investment. Now, tech is ubiquitous, easily accessible, and lots of people with most different backgrounds jump in. You'd be amazed how many 'developers' fail to solve FizzBuzz test. We actually DO test applicants with it, and results are extremely appalling. I am unable to understand how a person who calls himself a developer and has experience can fail this, but I have learned to accept this as an observed phenomenon.

krembo 7y ago

"Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders." +1 for this

arghwhat 7y ago

I would argue that StackOverflow itself is not a problem—it is instead the laziness of many in the "newer" generations of programmers. StackOverflow has many great explanations, which are no different than reading a chapter in a book (it's just a book that is extremely relevant to you problem). The problem is that lazy people demand code dumps, and lazy people provide code dumps instead of explanations. This then becomes a feedback loop as people get used to this degree of laziness. This is especially rampant for Web topics, and to some extend also a counter-argument to the Borland help pages with examples: When presented with a fully written solution, people will blindly copy it and only do the minimum amount of work to make it run.

kungito 7y ago
I believe if nothing else then it's the fact that there are more programmers meaning less hardcore people who just want to get shit done and move on
- kuzimoto 7y ago
  I think this is accurate. I'm pretty technical but with no formal education on programming. Currently I can only tinker with programming in my free time. There are a lot of huge gaps in my knowledge and it sucks sometimes, but at least Stack Overflow allows me to solve certain problems more easily, so I can get on with doing fun stuff.
- arghwhat 7y ago
  Regardless of trade, I never approve of this mentality as the "shit" rarely gets done responsibly or sufficiently, as that cannot be done without fully understanding at least the chosen implementation. Perfectionism is not required, and can get in the way of professionalism. This is about a minimum amount of responsibility. (Learning is different though.)

twodave 7y ago

I don’t really blame StackOverflow here. We are living in an age where there are exponentially more people attempting to program than their used to be, and with lots of different motivations. Many of those people just aren’t capable or interested in being experts. The problem as I see it isn’t that this situation exists, but that those workers still command such high salaries. We aren’t nearly as close as you suggest do the level of code generation that would replace the bottom quarter of the labor pool even, but if that day ever comes I believe it will be really profitable for the top 20-30%.

pjc50 7y ago

Speaking as someone who learned in the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C era, StackOverflow has moved the state of the art on hugely, and people's dependency on it is more a symptom of the environements they are working in than anything else. > Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again. The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDOS environment was not a moving target and had no security considerations. The world is very different now; we do so much programming in the browser because it's the one single cross-platform zero-friction environment we have. But those reasons also make it a battleground between platform monopolists. There is also so much more software. Part of the problem that Stackoverflow solves is dealing with this. You can't be an expert on everything, there isn't enough time and it moves too fast. So you need a quick solution to incidental problems so you can get back to the "core" problem. (credentials: the code I wrote at age sixteen for doing 3D rendering https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc )

cr0sh 7y ago
Interesting code and fairly readable; I liked the simple scripting system, and there were a few comments and examples, and yes - double buffering of the Mode 13h screen (though the memory allocation seemed weird, but maybe there was a good reason for that). Certainly better written code than what I was writing at 16, mainly in BASIC and assembler at the time (was a fan of the Lee Adams series of 3D programming books). Affordable C compilers (for a teenager at least) were not really a thing at the time (IIRC, even the DOS stuff, if you owned such a machine which I did not, still cost a couple hundred dollars around 1989-90-ish). I didn't manage to get a C compiler until the mid-90s when I picked up a copy of Turbo C for DOS, but I still think I paid $100 for the privilege.
bitwize 7y ago
> browser > zero-friction environment Giggle.
- pjc50 7y ago
  If you know another way I can deploy code instantly on everything from PCs to phones to televisions without even having to sign anything, pay anything, or get approval, I'm all ears.

jmull 7y ago

The stackoverflow just makes it easy to look up trivia. The internet in general makes it easy to look up answers to simple problems. That leaves more time for the interesting problems. I think that makes programmers generally smarter than before. They start from a higher base and can climb more quickly. Also, you’re overestimating the potential trajectory of current approaches to AI.

aNoob7000 7y ago

Since the early days of my career, people keep predicting the demise of the programmer. I remember CASE tools, and then Microsoft with VB were signs of the end. Roll forward 30+ years in IT, and complexity keeps going up, and programmers are still needed. Maybe I'm just old, but I'm probably going to retire, and AI is not going to replace any programmers. From what I see, the quality of the software in Corporate America reassures me that programmers will have jobs for many decades to come.

bluedino 7y ago
Visual Basic might be second to only PHP in the amount of terrible code it has allowed shadetree porogrammers to create.
- justinclift 7y ago
  Are you not familiar with javascript?
  - zubairq 7y ago
    Yes you can write terrible code with my Visual basic clone in Javascript here instead: https://github.com/zubairq/pilot https://github.com/zubairq/pilot
- arpa 7y ago
  What's a shadetree porogammer?

simonh 7y ago

One of the issues is people in general don't pay for dev tools anymore, and writing documentation is laborious. Borland could pay documentation authors to write extensive help and examples because they charged money, and sold a ton of licenses. Stack Overflow is simply crowd-sourcing the same thing. 'Eventually' is likely to be a very, very long time. I doubt we'll have self-programming systems like that even in my children's lifetime. It will likely take AGI to do it. There's the classic tale of programmers back in the 90s quiting their jobs because they thought Visual Basic would let non-technical bureaucrats write their own software, so there would be no need for specialist software engineers anymore. One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I'm not an AI denier. Eventually we will get AGI, I think it's inevitable. It's just that the time horizon is so far off it's not really worth worrying about. We don't even have a clue how to go about designing it's general operational parameters or architecture yet.

cr0sh 7y ago
> One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I have some minor-level experience with self-driving car software, algorithms, etc. The majority of this is from various MOOCs I have participated in over the years, as well as research papers, books, and other things I have read and consumed. In short, I am not an expert, but I am not unfamiliar with the technology, either. I personally think we'll never see actual widespread usage of self-driving vehicles outside of a very few narrow and carefully controlled (and regulated) cases. At least, I suspect, within my lifetime (which honestly, I'll be lucky for another 30 years or so). My reasoning is that people will only trust perfection when it comes to riding in a self-driving vehicle. They will only be willing to use one if they can be assured that it will Never Crash, or be crashed into. They have no problem driving a car themselves, or being surrounded by other people driving cars. They have no problem with those crashing and even killing people - maybe even themselves (though they tell themselves fairy tales of it-will-never-happen-to-me to soothe over the reality). But introduce a machine into the equation... ...and that machine has to be Perfect. It cannot make any mistakes. It must avoid issues and be Safe 100% of the time, no exceptions. In other words, people want the impossible from a machine, but will give utmost allowances to themselves and others as "humans". I think a lot of this has to do with assignment of blame. When they crash or are crashed into - there is someone to assign blame to; themselves, the other driver, etc. Someone they can yell at, figuratively or literally. A self-driving car? No one to yell at. No one to assign blame. Nothing that will feel bad for its error or failure to avoid something. People can't handle that. They don't want a self-driving vehicle that has a safety factor of say, "seven 9s" - it has to be 100% safe or nothing. Because even if it makes a mistake only once out of a million miles of driving, that is still not safe enough. They want the unobtainable - a perfect machine, a machine that will never fail. Nothing like that can or will ever exist (basic laws of thermodynamics prevent it, for one thing). Even though they themselves, or even the most professional of professional drivers - can't even come close to approaching this level. It both madness, and understandable at the same time.

blablabla123 7y ago

But StackOverflow helps only with basic to common intermediate problems. The most upvoted answers often resemble the most common beginner problems. So it indeed very much replaces the old paper/online help documentation, is often better written and more readily available. On the other hand for more difficult problems it's common to not get an answer. In fact the problem might be so specific that it's even against the SO rules. > coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine I was expecting this development with the rise of React since at least the visualization part has become completely declarative. It's no rocket science to automatically transform that, in fact being an XML dialect there are a lot of tools available for this. But still, even in 2020 people still make money with writing HTML/CSS either plain or within a CMS. In fact even a reverse development happened in some regard. In the 90s it was quite common for people to write CRUD apps running in Access, FoxPro etc. These tools - like Delphi which might be closest to that - practically disappeared. The analytical load is still there and cannot be abstracted away. The decline of Access etc. happened because many aspects couldn't be mapped. Not to speak of all the nitty gritty details needed to make applications run safely and maintainable. There's still a very long road ahead to automatize all that, especially in a way that it consumes only a reasonable amount of CPU, memory and storage...

austincheney 7y ago

I have been thinking the frustrations I am forming with writing software was due to an ever lowering barrier of entry. I never thought about mental laziness as a factor, but that explains the frustrations so much more clearly. My frustrations as HN comments: * Selective bias in candidate selection - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098101 * Low productivity environments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21965539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21965539 * False equivalence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904199 * There are only 2 APIs for working in the browser and yet most developers can't figure it out to save their careers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849398 * Invented Here stupidity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417450 * The DOM is a 20 year old standard that is the primary interface to any markup language and the primary interface when working in the browser, yet it is still somehow an arcane mystery of lost knowledge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069571 * More about hiring bias - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21015495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21015495 * Excessive sensitivity not found in other industries. I have heard that several psychologists are predicting my children's generation will be the most offensive generation as a counter to the extreme sensitivity (fragility) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668380 * More selective bias, online code tests. Now when I see online code tests without extremely specific grading criteria I instantly terminate the conversation. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605329

Accujack 7y ago

> general AI will allow non-programmers Sure... when general AI becomes available, flexible, and has solid usability for something like this. Which will be about the time that faster than light stardrives become common and our meals are materialized out of thin air on demand. Despite perceptions, the last few years' "AI boom" is mostly marketing. Advances in processor power have made deep learning algorithms practical outside lab settings, but we're not even close to a "generic AI" that can think as well as even a dog can. That's decades away at the earliest. Right now, we don't even understand how our own brains work.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

> Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. I don't think SO has dumbed down people. It's just the average level has tanked because of influx of people in tech. In 1980s average computer person was highly skilled, educated and intelligent, because even to get access to even the simplest computer required a solid dedication and investment. Now, tech is ubiquitous, easily accessible, and lots of people with most different backgrounds jump in. You'd be amazed how many 'developers' fail to solve FizzBuzz test. We actually DO test applicants with it, and results are extremely appalling. I am unable to understand how a person who calls himself a developer and has experience can fail this, but I have learned to accept this as an observed phenomenon.