Flutter web + auto complete with VS code. Even then it feels like an exercise in futility
Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
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Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#52There's so much involved, it's almost impossible to do many things from memory, especially across all different languages, frameworks, tools, platforms, etc. In the old days (for me, late 80's to early 90's, programming without the Internet), I remember having books next to the computer. Things were much simpler then.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?
> stack overflow didnt package so easily You just need some copy of something like: the way back machine, google cache or archive.is and then do asynchronous mirroring and you are not so far behind. Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
> Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
If it prompted the meeting organiser to put their one point into an email, thereby saving 6 people a 45 minute meeting, would it be a problem or a feature?
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#54This specific case, and the norm of interviewing without access to references is not that interesting.
But it is kinda like a specialized version of a fun party question, "With what you know now, if you were sent back in time, how far could you go and usefully employ your knowledge of the future?" (E.g. I know chemical fertilizer is a big deal, but I definitely do not know how to make it. I studied heat engines in a physics class, but could not spark the industrial revolution a century earlier.)
Maybe the midway point between these is something like, "if you were sent back to an earlier era in computing, how far back could you go while usefully applying your current knowledge?" E.g. I work with the jvm constantly and I know that it was a big deal for a popular language to have an actually described memory model, but I couldn't build it myself in the 80s. Maybe I could build MapReduce or Spark in the 90s?
It's _hard_ working without the informational resources you're used to, but there are so many more fun ways to explore that gradient than web apps.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?
And what if you wanted to go camping on the ocean floor? Can you start a camp fire underwater? That you can imagine some convoluted scenario where a skill could be employed does not mean it is an efficient use of your time to develop that skill, particularly when that scenario is easily avoidable.
Well said.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#56I doubt most developers can do this. Especially if it involves all the configuration needed to deploy the site. I don't think they need to anyways. Most development involves a small amount of custom application logic and a large amount of hooking things together and manipulating data into the right format. Any programming of this sort requires lots of documentation checking to make sure everything is integrated properly.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#57Yes. It’s not that hard, so long as your definition of “basic web app” is server rendered HTML and CSS. I could certainly do that from scratch in Ruby without Google. If I didn’t have Google I wouldn’t want to use Rails - even though I know the framework well, there’s a lot there to remember.
But I would expect anyone who is (a) proficient with a high level programming language and (b) has ever built a web app from scratch would be able to say yes to this as well, so long as they get to work in the language they know well.
The author of this post specifically does not fit this criteria:
> To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely shocked by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw together a small web app about once every 6 months.
Also, JS is part of the problem. Even avoiding the chaotic world of front-end by assuming strict SSR using something like Express, Node would be one of the more difficult ecosystems build in from memory, because JS doesn’t have the level of standard library that most languages do, because it changes so fast, and because it’s drunk the micro package kool-aid so hard (aka left_pad).
But for developers fluent in Ruby, Python, Go, Java, PHP, and probably several others, I would think this is a very realistic ask.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#58Well there is this quote, often attributed to Einstein himself: “Never memorize something that you can look up.”
I don't know whether he really said or thought anything like that, and I also don't actually agree with the literal meaning. There are some things that it pays to memorize, in my opinion. As I keep reminding my daughters: times tables (or math facts as they seem to be known nowadays) are important forever.
The principal behind the quote, however, I'm fully behind. I live in the docs. Even if it's something that I know pretty well, I often like to check to make sure I understand exactly what's going down. There are too many little details that are easy to forget. If it's important and you aren't sure, look it up!
Finally, I could probably claim to be able to write build a simple web app without using google, but I'm sure I would lean heavily on my editor to remind me of argument order, syntax, etc. Maybe there is a little bit of difference there: if my editor/IDE can tell me what I need to know, it's probably just that bit faster than searching for it in a browser.
Shoutout to lsp-mode.
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#59Does it actually matter if I can? Is using reference material a bad thing? Edit: I know the article touches on that idea briefly but my argument would be "of course it doesn't matter". Sure, I could develop slightly faster with a more encyclopedic memory but I really doubt it would make an observable difference in the long-term. Most of my time isn't spent referencing libraries or syntax but instead I spend most of m…
It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order of arguments in the reference.
It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine.
So many answers on the internet are written by absolute beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they are shallow and miss context.
The problem is excacerbated by the fact that 1000s of sites try to get into the top results for programming questions. So you end up with crappy shallow answers, and never learn the underlying details.
And then there's the problem that the more experienced you get, the less you look up answers, so the less you are exposed to sites like Stack Overflow, and the less you contribute to Stack Overflow. So the result is that the least experienced contribute most to the answers on the web.
My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions.
The downside of books is that it only works for "old" tech. If you want to learn about the hot new Swift UI Declarative Reactive Whatever, your out of luck and you need to scrape together any info you can find from random blog posts...
Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t
#60I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?
Yeah, I was just thinking of how every developers cube used to have stacks of books and binders of CDs from MSDN.