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Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
81–90 of 181 posts
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#82Sort of related... is google case sensitive for things like this? Of course, CASE MATTERS often in programming.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like a pretty safe idea.
Do it in a VM, and it is.
A VM is also just software, plenty of quest-to-host escapes in the last few years...
I bet that many people that should know better here have never updated their VM, except those who are warned by the auto updater that is.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put keywords in quotes and Google will not exclude them.
Thank you, that's a helpful tip! I used to use many modifiers for my Google queries, but Google dropped support for many of them, and doesn't seem to document comprehensively what they actually support from day to day. I wish excluded keywords were the only frustration. Their index seems to have gotten considerably worse at dealing with any somewhat "long-tail" query. I'm not sure why. I suspect they've won the spam…
My favorite modifier removal: Currently, you can use - to exclude keywords. Once upon a time, you could use + to require a keyword... until Google+ came out, and + became how you would search for people's profiles.
sigh
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#85I often joke that my ability to formulate good Google queries is the single most important part of my software engineering skillset. Except, you know, I'm not really joking.
I'd love to learn this. If anyone has any good resources, please let me know!
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#86I probably Google more for questions about Netty than I do for anything else in Java. I've never seen such a useful library with such terrible documentation
The Netty documentation really is terrible. Have you read Netty In Action? That book made the framework much clearer.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#87> “Never memorize something that you can look up.” - Albert Einstein Here's the actual [1], and perhaps more meaningful, quote: "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Yet we force people in interviews to remember things standing in front of a whiteboard.
How much you remember is also correlated to how much you actually use certain things; it can be a good signal for whether you have practical experience with X.
For some companies, it's what they need in a hire. For others it's OK to just ensure people have a sound problem solving strategy and above-average general cognition.
I think you'll find varying levels of what you might consider nitpicking depending on the sort of company you're interviewing at.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#88For programmers that were coding before good search engines: what did you do when you wanted to look up an error, etc back then? Crack open a tome for the language? Just curious as I can't imagine it was easy.
If it was time sensitive, and a show-stopper error, I usually just had to solve the problem using a different approach/library/tool. Sometimes you could find someone on irc to help, but that was pretty hit or miss.
If there was time, I would post on either a bbs, or usenet (comp.lang.*), and hope somebody else had the answer.
The ecosystem was better documented at the time though. Solaris manuals, for example, were very extensive. You didn't have the litany of third party tools that you do today. So, problems that weren't explained in the manuals weren't as common.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#89I wonder if maybe some geniuses could parse out all of the code on Stack Overflow and connect it to some knowledge graph, connect that with Google's knowledge graph, and integrate everything into a giant programming problem solving deep learning system with Deep Mind/Tensor Flow. Or something.
It just seems like people are googling, landing on Stack Overflow, and solving the same problems so many times.. especially if you could somehow follow through from the code on the screen, the google searches, pages landed on, and then the code or commands that got entered in.. I think that a lot of these recurring questions or problems could almost be solved/programmed by an AI.
Maybe if you could get a web extension running on thousands of developers computers.. maybe for Chromebooks if it could read the code out of crosh.. then monitor all of the searches and coding/terminal commands and create a giant deep learning/reinforcement learning network thing out of that.
Or maybe for monitoring the terminal code and commands some kind of background terminal program would be needed. Maybe ttylog or screen or tailing a tty device or something.
Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
#90Another essential point here is when you get 'fancy' error messages. Google is amazing at finding why (and usually, The Patch) when you fail to compile random packages. I have my own little cross-distro builder[0] and I /rarely/ bother trying to dive into autoconf/make hell before cut+pasting the exact error message into google! That very likely saved my sanity many times over :-) Otherwise I agree with the article -…
Much like the sort algorithm that downloads and evals Stack Overflow answers until the list is sorted, someone should make a build tool that Googles any error output, installs possible patches, and restarts the build. It could even see if adding the patch caused a new error and decide whether to roll back or keep patching.
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