this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Our computer science professor in some programming course at university told us we were not supposed to take advice from the internet or answers from Stack Overflow for half a year... Until we learned the ropes. And could asses for ourselves what's right and what is wrong. (And I believe that was some C/C++ course where you get lots of opportunuties to do silly things that might somehow work but for all of the wrong reasons.)
I think he was right. There is lots of misinformation out there that isn't a proper design pattern. And with copy-pasting stuff, you don't necessarily learn anything. Whereas learning with some method is efficient and works.
And I'm pretty sure I'm not super intelligent, but all of that isn't really hard. I mean if someone codes regularly, they might as well learn how to do it properly. It takes a bit of time initially... But you get that time back later on. Though... I'd let AI write some boilerplate code. Or design a website if I'm not interested at all how the HTML and CSS works... I think that's alright to do.
The real learning comes from debugging the garbage code you copied from stack overflow
I mean it also contains great stuff. Niche workarounds, ways to do something more efficiently than some standard library function does.
You just need a means of telling apart the good and the bad. Because there's also people smashing their forehead on the keyboard until it happens to be something that compiles. And people repeating urban legends and outdated info. You somehow need background knowledge to tell which is which. AI didn't invent phrasing some nonesense with full conviction. It is very good at doing exactly that, but we humans also have been doing that since the beginning of time.
Debugging and being able to interpret documentation when it exists.
But good lord, the amount of programmers I work with that never use an IDE debugger is unreal. I get that you don't have to, but Jesus Christ, if yout not getting an expected result, it's way fucking faster to step through the code and see where the data changes then to slap logging into every line and attempt to read the output.
Debugging only teaches logic. Not structure. No amount cut, paste, debug with teach you the factory pattern.
Which is widely overused.