Learning to “google well” has become the fundamental skill to replace reading/writing well in life. Scary.
How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
51–60 of 155 posts
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#52My 2cents. Don't be fooled by this false sense of know-how when you just start being able to write some html/js stuff. Googling a problem is a reflex when you start coding, and yes, good or bad googling abilities could be the difference between you still being in the industry in 5 years or not. But, still, this is only a first step on your path, and stopping there will also stop you from being a real hacker. There ar…
I started learning in 2000, before Google was big and Stack Oveflow didn't exist. I think every new programmer gets a false sense of how easy everything is.
14 years of learning later, I now realize how little I know.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#53This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…
This is something I've always wondered - how do programmers who don't natively speak, read, or write English cope with the sheer amount of literature they have to parse to have a career programming?
I always google in english and this is a huge plus comparing to my coworking looking for answers in french. Even when they find answers, the quantity and the quality is lesser.
Hopefully, it doesn't take a lot of english to be able to read programming question on stackoverflow. If you have difficulties reading english and you want to do programming, focusing on just that will help a lot. You don't really need to be able to speak or to listen which are harder (at least for me ).
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
OT: > "it's rather the exception than the norm" > "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat are involved." How does one learn to use idioms like a native?
Reading literature, watching films, listening to the music. Basically, delving into culture which contains common phrases, idioms and sayings scattered around. You hear/read them, understand meaning from context, and commit to memory so you can use it later on. This is not really that different from how kids learn idioms too, isn't it? By the way, a lot of idioms/saying are pretty similar in different countries. Thei…
France here - starting as a student and stepping into the university library, it took me 30 seconds to realize that everything interesting was written in English and not being able to proficiently ingurgitate vast amount of it was going to be a problem. I just shunt French as written input for the next 5 years. When the valley called for a job, I was ready. Pasteur said "Chance favors the prepared mind" - he was relating it to the field of observation but it obviously applies almost anywhere.
Nowadays, if you have access to the Internet, there's no excuse not to be proficient with English. I've noticed during my travel that youngsters with a bit of education (high school or better) in countries where movies/series aren't translated (because the market is just too small) have very good English level. France has an official language which means that content is vastly translated and this-is-bad(TM) - the we are slower at getting better at English.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#55I currently work with a bunch of people who are "business majors" or whatever and are similarly self-taught in the Tech/IT/Programming space. It's interesting to watch how they work and the kinds of outputs they produce. Quite a lot of the stuff works... mostly... It's entirely untestable, not repeatable, undocumented and just stuck together with flaky glue code. Sure, if you aiming to "make it work" you can do that.…
> It's entirely untestable, not repeatable, undocumented and just stuck together with flaky glue code. Code that's testable, repeatable, well-documented and elegant doesn't guarantee that an application will actually meet anyone's needs in a commercially sufficient manner. The WordPress code base is frequently criticized, and the Facebook index.php code from 2007[1] will probably make some people cringe, but these ar…
If the Facebook code had stayed untestable and undocumented, it would never have worked at their current scale.
Testing and documentation make a difference in the long term. Unless your business model is "build a shiny tower and sell it before it crumbles", at some point, you'll have to fix the mess you made in the early days of the application.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone whose native language is not English (and didn't receive particularly good English classes at school, but had access to the Internet): if you start at a young enough age, you pick it up somewhat naturally. Seriously. In my case, wanting to "do X thing in VB6" drove me to read heaps of text in English, and even if I couldn't make sense of everything I could kind of guess what they were saying from the conte…
Well, before that you have to be able to read Latin alphabets. I had to. You may be fortunate enough to have a native language that happens to share the writing system with English, but a lot of people don't. Actually, I think the majority of people don't.
Learning another alphabet usually only takes a week or two with flashcards though. I wouldn't imagine that will hold anyone back. Though encouragement would help.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone whose native language is not English (and didn't receive particularly good English classes at school, but had access to the Internet): if you start at a young enough age, you pick it up somewhat naturally. Seriously. In my case, wanting to "do X thing in VB6" drove me to read heaps of text in English, and even if I couldn't make sense of everything I could kind of guess what they were saying from the conte…
Your English is excellent. It's sad that a single non-idiomatically phrased sentence can "blow" your cover though, e.g. "some few words", that gave it away instantly.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, being able to recognise non-native speakers (based on accents and non-idiomatic sentences) is apparently a significant evolutionary advantage. I remember reading most people can identify a person speaking in a foreign accent within 80ms. That's pretty impressive!
I'm currently trying to actively get rid of my accent. I've been asked a few times whether I'm actually British, and pretty much nobody can actually guess where I'm from.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone whose native language is not English (and didn't receive particularly good English classes at school, but had access to the Internet): if you start at a young enough age, you pick it up somewhat naturally. Seriously. In my case, wanting to "do X thing in VB6" drove me to read heaps of text in English, and even if I couldn't make sense of everything I could kind of guess what they were saying from the conte…
Well, before that you have to be able to read Latin alphabets. I had to. You may be fortunate enough to have a native language that happens to share the writing system with English, but a lot of people don't. Actually, I think the majority of people don't.
That's very true, and I didn't think about it. I'm very fortunate in that regard.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#59This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…
As a comparison, my German (as a foreign language) used to tell us the first year we learned it, "beginners shouldn't use a bilingual dictionary".
In order to ensure the word you found in the dictionary is correct, you need to be good enough in the language. Often there will be homonymns in your native language, and you'll get the wrong word. For example you want to translate the bank of a river but end up with the place that keeps your money.
It's the same with answers you get from Google or Stack Overflow about programming. If you're not good enough to ensure they're correct, you'll be in trouble.
Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, before that you have to be able to read Latin alphabets. I had to. You may be fortunate enough to have a native language that happens to share the writing system with English, but a lot of people don't. Actually, I think the majority of people don't.
Learning another alphabet usually only takes a week or two with flashcards though. I wouldn't imagine that will hold anyone back. Though encouragement would help.
Learning an alphabet might not be particularly difficult in itself, but being able to consciously identify symbols is not enough for your brain to form higher-level abstractions. It's not unattainable by any means, of course, it's just a significant obstacle. (IMO)