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Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

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Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#171

Post by therealjumbo »

Ensorceled wrote: post #93
verytrivial wrote: post #80

Experienced programmers probably also have a good feel for whether the problem they're having is truly unique (and not worth searching for), whether others will be able to articulate the problem, and how long it might take to solve the issue from first principles, hence how much effort is worth investing in the Google excavation.

Most experienced programmers also have a good feel for how much harder it is to write a solid, tested, scalable module yourself than integrate a open source solution, even if it's not perfect.

>Most experienced programmers also have a good feel for how much harder it is to write a solid, tested, scalable module yourself than integrate a open source solution, even if it's not perfect.

Funny story, when I was just starting out in this field, my client wanted his chip to communicate with a sensor that was already on his board. This was at the time, a brand new, unreleased product. Because our hardware engineering department didn't like to communicate with the software engineering department the CPU they chose for the project didn't support i2c, but they sensor they chose (out of many thousands of different sensors from different manufacturers) only communicated over i2c.

At the time I was obviously very frustrated with the hardware engineers so I did a simple search for other sensors in the same category. Most of them would communicate over a handful of different protocols, it just so happens that the one they picked only supported i2c.

So, since I was just starting out and my client was breathing down my neck for access to the sensor that he paid for, I figured I didn't have enough time to write my own bit-bang software driver for i2c. Instead, I would just find one on google... So the driver I picked had a really tricky bug in it where it was bit-shifting the address of the device it was supposed to be communicating with. A logic analyzer came in really handy here. So my "solution" was, instead of fixing the bug properly, I just manually bit-shifted the address the opposite direction, and then the driver bit-shifted it back. At first I used the "I estimate, that had hardware and software engineering communicated better, and worked together better, we could have shaved half the development time off of that project. Such a waste.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#172

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Ensorceled wrote: post #93
verytrivial wrote: post #80

Experienced programmers probably also have a good feel for whether the problem they're having is truly unique (and not worth searching for), whether others will be able to articulate the problem, and how long it might take to solve the issue from first principles, hence how much effort is worth investing in the Google excavation.

Most experienced programmers also have a good feel for how much harder it is to write a solid, tested, scalable module yourself than integrate a open source solution, even if it's not perfect.

Yet all I remember is the times that third party code has failed me. It is a strange quirk of human memory.

It's not just me, either - one example was a failure in STL map that was as old as the product. It was a known defect but nobody had the heart to face it. When I showed them the defect, people got rather angry with me.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#173

Post by ArkyBeagle »

pbnjay wrote: post #143
jupiter90000 wrote: post #27

For 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.

I remember actually going to my local library and finding some detailed technical books (in my case DOS Interrupts I think), and reading a lot to find out WTF was going on.

Our team lead bought us all a copy of "Advanced MS DOS" for that. We'd have "Taylor Thursdays" where we'd all eat lunch close to a Taylor's Books and spend an hour or two scouring the shelves.

I did once go to the library for a reference to a 1950s book on relevance trimming of search indexing - probably about 10% of "MapReduce".

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#174

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Ensorceled wrote: post #91

One of the more frustrating parts of my job is dealing with junior and intermediate programmers who spin their wheels try to figure it out themselves rather than google it. Things like spending several hours on a problem where copy/pasting the error into google yields a github issue complete with a work around or writing a boat load of code when there already exists a package or plugin that does exactly that. The wor…

FWIW, even in the 1980s, people on the team had CompuServe accounts and we raided those mercilessly.

Where do you find junior programmers who don't Google with impunity?

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#175

Post by GFischer »

arsenide wrote: post #123
Keyframe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a guy, on stackoverflow, commenting condescendingly on my question (or was it an answer, can't remember) that I was wrong and I should edit my post with his answer instead. All would be well if it wasn't on a 6 year old post at the time, and he was wrong. Ah, stackoverflow - what happened to you? It was fine and dandy when it was all loose. Now you ask a question and it's immediately flagged for various reasons…

The one time I posted a question on SO, it got flagged as duplicate and there were links to multiple other questions that were not even remotely the same to mine. Even more so, the tagged questions were not even mutually the same! It took two hours to carefully craft my question just to have it immediately shot down. It is needless to say I have not posted again since.

Sometimes the problem with Stack Overflow is different: the question has been asked before and there ARE valid answers... for several years ago, which are no longer correct (or the "best" answers).

I think they're over-moderating the site. It's a shame because it's MUCH better than what was before.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#176

Post by toast0 »

k__ wrote: post #164
toast0 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done enough of the second approach, I find it hard to understand why people do the first -- why see what people wrote about what something does when you can just see what it does. Even man pages are some amount of here say, versus inspecting the code. That said, I do web search some specific terms frequently to get to certain documentation that I trust, SMS search is the easiest way to get there consistently.

Well, people think if they're using libs they couldn't write themselves, they don't think they could understand the code. For example, when I used Leaflet, I had no idea how this whole geo stuff worked, so I assumed that the code would be like higher math to me.

There's plenty of things that I can't write that I can understand. Even if I can't understand it, I can look and see what it's expecting for arguments and figure out why it doesn't like what ever thing I sent that was probably dumb.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#177

Post by nitrogen »

developer2 wrote: post #99
striking wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This. I can't believe someone approved removing the use of "+" as a search operator. It was at the very core of searching Google. It took months before I found out you needed to double-quote "every" "single" "damn" "individual" "word" to force searching by inclusion.

I think the day Google nerfed search for the sake of Plus was the day they jumped the proverbial shark. At least for me, that was when I stopped thinking Google could do no wrong. Then they nixed Reader.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#178

Post by Ensorceled »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #174
Ensorceled wrote: post #91

One of the more frustrating parts of my job is dealing with junior and intermediate programmers who spin their wheels try to figure it out themselves rather than google it. Things like spending several hours on a problem where copy/pasting the error into google yields a github issue complete with a work around or writing a boat load of code when there already exists a package or plugin that does exactly that. The wor…

FWIW, even in the 1980s, people on the team had CompuServe accounts and we raided those mercilessly. Where do you find junior programmers who don't Google with impunity?

They were hired by my client(s) :-P

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#179

Post by Ensorceled »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #172
Ensorceled wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most experienced programmers also have a good feel for how much harder it is to write a solid, tested, scalable module yourself than integrate a open source solution, even if it's not perfect.

Yet all I remember is the times that third party code has failed me. It is a strange quirk of human memory. It's not just me, either - one example was a failure in STL map that was as old as the product. It was a known defect but nobody had the heart to face it. When I showed them the defect, people got rather angry with me.

I find having a requirements.txt file really helps with this. When you struggle with a plugin and new to replace or rewrite it, removing the entry in the requirements reminds you of all the plugins you are happily using right now.

Re: Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

#180

Post by doug1001 »

koolba wrote: post #9

I not only use Google frequently, I use it to search for things I myself have written in the past. I can't count the number of times I've Googled for a programming question where the answer is found on a Stack Overflow page I've written. If it's a particularly old answer that I've completely forgotten, I've even thought to myself, " Wow this genius sounds just like me! "[1]. [1]: ... as well as " This idiot has no cl…

if there isn't already a word/term for this, perhaps there should be soon enough. (not an OED word, but a developer-lexicon term like "heisen bug", "smug report", "hinden bug" Like "hey i googled this problem and got auto-stacked"
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