The best programmers are the quickest to Google

If I worked at Microsoft?

I'd implement a Quicksort by checking within the existing codebases that I had access to and that were in the same language to see if it had already been done, then patch what I found to match my needs for comparisons, etc.

Note: one big reason for this is licensing - if it was developed in-house, odds are that licensing issues are a non-factor but if it came from "The Internets" then life may get strange. Strange is bad.

When I started learning programming it was book (often terribly shitty ones, full of mistakes and non-working listings) and hear-and-say.

I started at 11 years old or so. I didn't yet have a modem (not before I was 16 or so).

So it was trial and error and trying to figure things out. I remember printing a huge assembly program on a dot-matrix printer and going to a friend's place with the listing, explaining him that the routine would work for a few seconds then crash. Then he read the stuff and after a while he found the error : I was using 'jsr' instead of 'jmp', leading to an eventual stack blow.

And there were also "scene disks" or "news disk" from the scene or whatever they were called that we would copy from our friends. I remember one from some scandinavian group (I was in France), in english, where they were explaining various sorting algorithms and where/when we should use them in intros / demos (before cracked games).

It was all a "black art" because these stuff (learning assembly to code intros / demos / cracktros [but they weren't called cracktros yet IIRC]) weren't in books, nor in magazines.

Then came my first modem (9600 bauds) and pirate BBSes (and writing intros for these BBSes) and suddenly a whole world of knowledge opened to us. It was magic.

Then came my first Internet ISP. Long before Google and no need for Google : old search engine were sufficient to find gems (Like Fravia's tools of the trade tutorials to learn how to pirate games on the PC, very convenient when you just arrived from the C64 / Amiga scene).

And of course there was Usenet. Usenet and a good kill files was immensely more useful than StackOverflow. Heck, the amount of knowledge on Usenet still probably dwarfs SO today.

I'd say DejaNews (later bought by Google and more or less became part of Google Groups) was the most important search engine of them all when it came to code. A good Usenet reader was useful to stay up to date and to ask/answer question while DejaNews contained all Usenet's archive (and a search engine).

That's what I remember, more or less... : )

I think that is cultural;

a practician in Latin countries (in Europe) would loose any credibility by acknowledging they have to check a knowledge base (although it does make sense). In a similar fashion a teacher would literally loose face in front of his student for recognizing he does not know the answer to a question on his subject from the top of his head.

That said, and by experience, I have seen plenty doctors checking their books on illness to match symptoms, but they did that in such a serious manner, you would believe they were just needing confirmation of memorized knowledge. Whereas I have seen plenty teachers/lecturers just dismissing the answer as obvious or the question as irrelevant.

I would actually recommend Wiki (specifically wikimedia) software for this doing this.

It can act very much like a blog, but also brings along features of many Knowledgebases, like versioning of information. Sometimes problems evolve, and being able to keep track of that is beneficial.

I'm glad I finally saw someone say this. It seems like we're a dying breed: those of us who got into CS for the sheer enjoyment of solving problems. Making fancy things happen on the screen is simply a positive side effect for us. I abhor that development these days is 90% Googling shit and 10% actual creativity. I go out of my way to keep my day job interesting.