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>I still sometimes look at code [...] and think, generations of coders must figure out something more practical Imagine if package management happened this way

>I still sometimes look at code [...] and think, generations of coders must figure out something more practical Imagine if package management happened this way: say you want to update your version of, oh I don't know, wget. First you Google "wget" and your operating system (analogy for your programming language). Then you open... not the wget page. There is none. You open stack overflow tabs. Not just one either. You look through them, i.e. the answers, the comments about the answers. Finally you find one that people report actually works, you copy a massive block of code into a text file. You make some changes, as it isn't really complete. You save it. You compile it. And, if it worked, there's the latest version of wget, and you move on. Sound reasonable? Apparently it is for programming languages.

trcollinson 11y ago
I am not sure that your analogy quite holds. Though maybe I am reading into it incorrectly. When I turn to Google or Stackoverflow the problem isn't something that could or should be solved by existing code or documentation. It's often more nebulous. I am sure there are those who strictly code by copying and pasting from StackOverflow but I would imagine in the long run they either get better at coding or they fail miserable. For me and most of the people I know who look things up it's more like, "I am working on this piece of code which is giving an error, and I have stared at it for a bit and I don't see what is wrong. I wonder if others have seen this problem before. I need a bit of inspiration to get me through it." It's almost like paired programming. It's not so much that I am looking for an answer, I am looking for a toe hold in order to push myself just a little higher on a cliff. Inspiration from others experiences helps me to move along quicker. I got this in the past from BBS's, books, and magazines. But now the internet has made that process quite a bit faster and less expensive. And that seems reasonable to me.
- logicallee 11y ago
  yes and no. It is often nebulous, but at the same time the nebulous parts are often incredibly well-defined, so that if your IDE came up with it instead of a Google result, you could fill in the blanks there and then. But your IDE doesn't do your Googling for you, you have to leave and come back.

trcollinson 11y ago

I am not sure that your analogy quite holds. Though maybe I am reading into it incorrectly. When I turn to Google or Stackoverflow the problem isn't something that could or should be solved by existing code or documentation. It's often more nebulous. I am sure there are those who strictly code by copying and pasting from StackOverflow but I would imagine in the long run they either get better at coding or they fail miserable. For me and most of the people I know who look things up it's more like, "I am working on this piece of code which is giving an error, and I have stared at it for a bit and I don't see what is wrong. I wonder if others have seen this problem before. I need a bit of inspiration to get me through it." It's almost like paired programming. It's not so much that I am looking for an answer, I am looking for a toe hold in order to push myself just a little higher on a cliff. Inspiration from others experiences helps me to move along quicker. I got this in the past from BBS's, books, and magazines. But now the internet has made that process quite a bit faster and less expensive. And that seems reasonable to me.

logicallee 11y ago
yes and no. It is often nebulous, but at the same time the nebulous parts are often incredibly well-defined, so that if your IDE came up with it instead of a Google result, you could fill in the blanks there and then. But your IDE doesn't do your Googling for you, you have to leave and come back.