4 ms·

That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the e

That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.

inquirerGeneral 1mo ago
Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/
insanitybit 1mo ago
> That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.
- skydhash 1mo ago
  > Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation. That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
  - insanitybit 1mo ago
    I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.
    - skydhash 1mo ago
      Why wouldn’t it be? If you were in charge of writing a letter and use words that hinders the purpose of the letter, thus resulting in a flawed communication, wouldn’t it be your fault? Especially when dictionaries are easily available?
      - insanitybit 1mo ago
        Sweet, okay so we're on the same page and the culture is still alive.
Barrin92 1mo ago
>people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. And they were correct. You're entirely right that this time it isn't different, but in the sense that the quality of both developers and code has been going downhill for decades. The only thing that has kept this industry alive is that hardware got more performant faster than developers became more inept. The non-strawman version of Socrates warning, that writing-based cultures would lose memory, take recorded fact at face value and mistake knowledge for wisdom was true as well. Your post is an example of this, you read something about Socrates, you didn't investigate and were fine with the appearance of knowledge, and because books can't defend themselves you mistook that for understanding. That's what he was concerned about, hordes of people with a vague assemblage of facts but no genuine capacity to critically think.
- newswasboring 1mo ago
  I am not arguing that things don't change and certain skills dont atrophy. I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop. But your personal attack makes me feel like your purpose is to win, not to be right.
  - Barrin92 1mo ago
    >I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow. There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

inquirerGeneral 1mo ago

Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/

insanitybit 1mo ago

> That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.

skydhash 1mo ago
> Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation. That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
- insanitybit 1mo ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    Why wouldn’t it be? If you were in charge of writing a letter and use words that hinders the purpose of the letter, thus resulting in a flawed communication, wouldn’t it be your fault? Especially when dictionaries are easily available?
    - insanitybit 1mo ago
      Sweet, okay so we're on the same page and the culture is still alive.

Barrin92 1mo ago

>people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. And they were correct. You're entirely right that this time it isn't different, but in the sense that the quality of both developers and code has been going downhill for decades. The only thing that has kept this industry alive is that hardware got more performant faster than developers became more inept. The non-strawman version of Socrates warning, that writing-based cultures would lose memory, take recorded fact at face value and mistake knowledge for wisdom was true as well. Your post is an example of this, you read something about Socrates, you didn't investigate and were fine with the appearance of knowledge, and because books can't defend themselves you mistook that for understanding. That's what he was concerned about, hordes of people with a vague assemblage of facts but no genuine capacity to critically think.

newswasboring 1mo ago
I am not arguing that things don't change and certain skills dont atrophy. I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop. But your personal attack makes me feel like your purpose is to win, not to be right.
- Barrin92 1mo ago
  >I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow. There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]