Don’t worry, once LLMs poison the well enough by disincentivizing sharing content online, technical books will thrive again.
LLMs are to a large degree trained on pirated books.
Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
71–80 of 367 posts
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Junior devs should still read to learn how to write the code. Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right?
Do you know how to operate a punch card?
> Do you know how to operate a punch card?
I remember! You created a control card, with tab stops and other controls, wrapped it around a control drum, and then had an easy time punching your source FORTRAN!
I just looked and found my old control drum, in the back of my junk drawer. But I can't find an old punch card machine in there, most have lost it somehow.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#73> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the…
I have found StackOverflow useful on rare occasion, but the friction, idiotic moderation culture, and high noise-to-signal ratio usually made it somewhere I didn't want to return to.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#74> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the…
I had a pretty good time asking a question about Prolog. It was a really interesting experience knowing that there's someone out there that high proficiency in a very niche language, patiently explaining to me an issue that they have probably heard a million times from yet another imperative programmer. They even have their own website advocating for Prolog, etc.
Now, I could imagine an LLM would be able to do the same. However, I understand that this is only possible because of people like them. I don't think the youngins that started with LLM directly would appreciate the humongous amount of data and discussions online that enables that. The internet is so much bigger than just Google, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#75> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#76> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the…
I thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relevant and useful to them although they never posted their own question or even made an account on the site.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#77Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points.…
I came here to say almost the same thing. I've been learning rust in my free time because I don't do enough programming at work to scratch that itch any more, and I've been using the rust book as a reference.
Thanks for the rec for "rust for rustaceans" I'll have a look into it.
I've only been using chatgpt for points where i'd normally go ask another dev for another set of eyes to debug something, otherwise all my learning and doing has been mostly the rust book, crates, and blogs about rust, ecs, roguelikes etc etc. It's been so fun!
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#78Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points.…
- PAIP
- The Art of of the Metaobject Protocol
- Modern C
Those alone are the ones I've been re-reading this year.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#79It used to be that you could buy a book and use it as a reference for years. That stopped being true sometime in the 1990s, as the half life of book value declined rapidly.
One persistent internet and Altavista became available it was just a matter of time, and now we're there. The whole move fast and break things culture won.
Like Chesterton's fence, you don't know what you're got until it's gone.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#80I think it might have been a cognitive development thing, but at some point in high school, Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" just kinda clicked for me, like I hadn't been reading it properly before.
I tried to get started with programming with books. But I just didn't seem to be getting anything, I'd read the chapters and not really learn or understand it. What really worked was interactive education like Codecademy and some others I have forgotten the name of. Reading a small paragraph and then immediately putting it in to action made everything clear far better than books did.
It's fascinating the different ways human minds work and learn. I'm the same way.
It also shows up in other areas like language learning where some people prefer classes and grammar books, and others prefer to just learn via exposure to a lot of content.