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There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into

by jrm4 4y ago

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sort of be the default deal.

jjfoooo4 4y ago
The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow. Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)
starik36 4y ago
> I can't think of a worse idea There are lots of worse ideas. Things get abstracted from us over time. 99% of the code in active development today probably lives in a source control repo that's in the cloud. At one point, decades ago, I looked with amusement on devs that couldn't do C/C++. But the reality was that it wasn't really needed anymore for most tasks.
- jrm4 4y ago
  This is different from what you're saying though. This isn't about "what basic knowledge is needed generally." This is about us frog-boiling ourselves into a world where we end up accepting the mentality that code is owned and controlled by the big company/entity in the center. For now it's "convenience," but if it continues it absolutely will turn into a center of power to be policed. "Dangerous code" will be censored, etc. In other words, yes, Stallman was right.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
like we (atleast people my age) by default are expected to have Instagram Snapchat WhatsApp YouTube Discord Reddit Spotify Twitter accounts and when I left some of these sources my friends actually questioned me about why I'd do that and some people even told me it was weird and I'll end up giving up material possessions and becoming a "sanyasi". fascinating that becoming a sanyasi is considered bad it actually sounds rather nice to me
rmbyrro 4y ago
> you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession Perhaps a bit of a stretch? Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully necessarily mean the quality of code will decrease? I mean, compared with the new devs knowing Git fully...
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully... That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't know what git IS; they think that GitHub is git.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I mean something broader than that here; I mean to say that "a generation of new devs who grow up in a world that sees git and Github as equivalent is perhaps likely to be something like a not-useful generation of mindless code drones doing little more than working for the proverbial 'man'" -- which, especially for CODING (in which hours doesn't mean accomplishment, unlike, say dentistry) simply isn't good for the world. There's some conflating of correlation and causation here, of course.

by jrm4 4y ago

jjfoooo4 4y ago

The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow. Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)

starik36 4y ago

> I can't think of a worse idea There are lots of worse ideas. Things get abstracted from us over time. 99% of the code in active development today probably lives in a source control repo that's in the cloud. At one point, decades ago, I looked with amusement on devs that couldn't do C/C++. But the reality was that it wasn't really needed anymore for most tasks.

jrm4 4y ago
This is different from what you're saying though. This isn't about "what basic knowledge is needed generally." This is about us frog-boiling ourselves into a world where we end up accepting the mentality that code is owned and controlled by the big company/entity in the center. For now it's "convenience," but if it continues it absolutely will turn into a center of power to be policed. "Dangerous code" will be censored, etc. In other words, yes, Stallman was right.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

like we (atleast people my age) by default are expected to have Instagram Snapchat WhatsApp YouTube Discord Reddit Spotify Twitter accounts and when I left some of these sources my friends actually questioned me about why I'd do that and some people even told me it was weird and I'll end up giving up material possessions and becoming a "sanyasi". fascinating that becoming a sanyasi is considered bad it actually sounds rather nice to me

rmbyrro 4y ago

> you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession Perhaps a bit of a stretch? Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully necessarily mean the quality of code will decrease? I mean, compared with the new devs knowing Git fully...

CRConrad 4y ago
> Does the fact that new devs don't know Git fully... That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't know what git IS; they think that GitHub is git.
jrm4 4y ago
I mean something broader than that here; I mean to say that "a generation of new devs who grow up in a world that sees git and Github as equivalent is perhaps likely to be something like a not-useful generation of mindless code drones doing little more than working for the proverbial 'man'" -- which, especially for CODING (in which hours doesn't mean accomplishment, unlike, say dentistry) simply isn't good for the world. There's some conflating of correlation and causation here, of course.