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I sat with a newbie programmer the other day. We sat there and made good use of third-party libraries, frameworks and code to get things moving, and concentrate

I sat with a newbie programmer the other day. We sat there and made good use of third-party libraries, frameworks and code to get things moving, and concentrate on the core problem at hand. Now, we had to Google a bit to install the third-party and dependency stuff, and tinker with configuration to get it all ready. Eventually we delivered the GUI version of 'Hello World', and the newbie programmer had already progressed several steps when he remarked: "So, modern programming is basically building my code on top of other people's code, without really knowing how it all works, if it is really any good, and hoping it all works well enough to make the whole thing work". Any he was right. Long gone is the time when we understood all the components and code for our entire domain. And we are often the poorer for it.

danneu 14y ago
The newbie's statement sounds like a romantic platitude. You should've shown the newbie programmer that programming is the art of abstraction and that there was never a pre-modern era where "we" were all toiling away with omniscient domain knowledge. We lean on other people's abstractions because we're mortal and the things we decide to abstract have a surface area that overwhelms the problem we're trying to solve. Rather than being poorer for it, we're immensely enriched with the ability to solve the problems of our domain with the same vernacular that expresses our problems. Total providence.