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>We are now in another period with great opportunity for people in the IT industry, and we want to have as many people as possible join the party! Everyone shou
by xasos 12y ago
>We are now in another period with great opportunity for people in the IT industry, and we want to have as many people as possible join the party! Everyone should code. And we have made it so easy! Create a GitHub account, watch some of the many, many tutorials out there, and get going! Yay!
>The sad truth is that something essential gets lost in all of this everyone-can-do-it-yay-lets-all-code euphory. I’m not exactly sure how to call it, so I’m going to pick something that is close enough to describe what I mean. I’m talking about craftsmanship.
Just because many newer developer's code is public on GitHub, it doesn't necessarily mean code quality is going down. Back five years ago, when many developer's code was stored on their machine, there was no way of knowing if their code was any good.
Now, developers are encouraged to show off what they have, because Git shows how you've progressed as a developer. It also allows for developers to help each other and make each other's code better. I know collaborating on GitHub has helped my code quality go up.
- drderidder 12y agoExactly. Is there value in learning to code? Of course. Does learning to code mean you will be able to write quality software? Unfortunately no. Especially if you learned to code in a sort of crash course on web application development. To be honest I've forgotten 90% of what I learned in engineering school, but I feel the triple-variable calculus, statistics, circuit design and assembly language driver hacking somehow prepared me for solving rather tough and unfamiliar problems in the real world. It's like music lessons - very beneficial in all kinds of tangential ways although very few students will become concert pianists.
- dasil003 12y agoOr to put it another way: you can't become a good programmer without first being a bad programmer.