As a developer new to Erlang, this is my life now. Google has been my Joe Armstrong book and the manual pages as howtos and fixes are scarce on the internet relative to, say, Ruby. If I had deadlines, I would be toast. But it feels nice to work a bit harder and think through things more -- now that this is my new reality. It's neat!
Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is, are you really learning? How much of that copy/pasted solution sticks with you a day or a week from now? The fact is we are missing the benefit of building up expertise that used to go along with spending time researching (through docs) and problem solving. When every problem is a google search away, there is a ceiling to how much expertise one can build up this way. Edit: the reflex downvoters will…
Some solutions aren't worth committing to memory. Do I really need to remember all the flags on scp just to write a quick bash script when someone has already posted the correct incantation on StackOverflow?
Do you have to google it every time? The fact that repeated googling is required is a sign that something is off--either you're not growing from your experience or the API has too much friction. I've often felt this way when it comes to linux command switches. Just accepting that having to google everything is OK is the wrong answer here.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#53> Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work. Nope. I remember specifically copying from known solutions in large organized reams of marked paper (a "book" we called it). They used to have whole rooms, and personnel, dedicated to storing them. Now, you couldn't just ask for what you wanted, like "clojurescript core.async examples". Oh, no. Research required either knowing how to search thro…
Yes, exactly, the old saying goes: RTFM (Read The Fine* Manual). In the 21st century google is the manual. If you're not looking stuff up in google, you're doing it wrong. It's great if you can do some stuff without using google, but memorizing reference material doesn't mean you're a better developer.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#54A lot of the problem with looking for an answer, especially if coupled to a powerful search system, is that you'll usually find one. Even when you're asking the wrong question. A large part of becoming a better developer, it seems to me, is learning to ask the right sorts of questions.
Which is difficult to do if you don't have a reasonably wide general knowledge and an understanding of why things are done a particular way, as compared to some other way, and what the trade-offs in that choice were.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#55> Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work. Nope. I remember specifically copying from known solutions in large organized reams of marked paper (a "book" we called it). They used to have whole rooms, and personnel, dedicated to storing them. Now, you couldn't just ask for what you wanted, like "clojurescript core.async examples". Oh, no. Research required either knowing how to search thro…
also there were magazines with full working programs (sometimes event 4 to 5 pages of "beautiful" BASIC) that you manually copied - letter by letter, number by number - into a trusted C64 (or other pre-historic computer thingie).
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#56Watch programmers who don't Google how they code, it usually ends up complicated, slow and worst of all insecure. If the only tool you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail. Using string.join instead of paremetherized SQL queries is a typically example of this! Any tutorial on top of Google will show you the correct solution to this but if you are too smart for this and reinvent your own way of creating queries then this will bite you in the ass one day.
Even if you think you know how to do something, spend 5 minutes on google to see if this is the defacto optimal solution for your problem and if there are any gotchas you have to consider. I'm not advocating blindly copy pasting code from random stackoverflow answers but at least look at them and understand what they do, then you can copy them.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#57>"...try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work." Once I decided I really wanted to learn to write code I just plain stopped with the copying and even referencing anything beyond docs or a thorough book. I work to create a functional implementation of whatever it is I'm looking for, no matter how naiv…
I have grown a lot in the last few months by consulting library code & documentation first when I hit a road block & only turning to Google/Stackoverflow if I hit a weird error message I don't understand or shit really hits the fan. One major benefit of opening up the source code when I'm using a library is it often sparks my interest to return to that library later just to learn more about how it works.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#58Developing is pretty hard. And, although you can get great information, Googling doesn't get you very far.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#59I think this is similar to the question "does using turn-by-turn GPS make me a better navigator?" The answer could go either way. If you depend on the GPS to the exclusion of paying any attention to your surroundings, you'll probably be a worse navigator, because it will take you much longer to learn even the common routes in your day-to-day life. If, on the other hand, you use GPS-aided navigation as an opportunity to learn the back roads that take you between two places more efficiently, but that you never would have discovered on your own, and internalize that knowledge, GPS can help you become much more intimately familiar with an area than you otherwise might be.
I see Google/Stack Overflow through the same lens. Lean too heavily on snippets of other peoples' code, and you'll never learn to solve even simple problems on your own. But if you take the time to actually learn why a particularly elegant answer on Stack Overflow works, and generalize that technique, you can grow your skillset much more quickly than by trying to figure out everything yourself from first principles.
Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
#60Quoting Albert Einstein: "Never memorize something you can look up in a book."