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But ... but ... coding is just finding the right chunk of code on SO, CP, or YT and chucking it at any old compiler you can find. The errors aren't your fault!
I thought everyone* knew that.
* Certainly, everyone asking questions in QA does ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: But ... but ... coding is just finding the right chunk of code on SO, CP, or YT
Of course it isn't! 
There's also the big job of posting "Send me codez" requests in QA! Clearly, you totally forgot about that! Are you sure you're really a coder at all? 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
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Damn! I've been sussed out as the fraud I am! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: But ... but ... coding is just finding the right chunk of code on SO, CP, or YT and chucking it at any old compiler you can find. The errors aren't your fault!
Yes, yes, that is all there is too it. You've got it now. 
And, yes, I know you are joking / being sarcastic. 
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He was joking?!!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Nope ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Copyright violation!! The FDA has been notified. 
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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ZurdoDev wrote: Copyright violation!! The FDA has been notified.
The Food and Drugs Administration doesn't care much about copyright. Maybe patent violations, when it comes to drugs (Big Pharma is throwing plenty of money at them), but those have nothing to do with copyright violations.
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dandy72 wrote: The Food and Drugs Administration doesn't care much about copyright.
Explain that to them when they show up at your house to confiscate your ramen noodles.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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I'll be waiting for them. Especially since I'm out of their jurisdiction.
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Big Pharma may through money at them to get drugs OK'd but it's purely the legal system as to how patents are handled. It's not so much they don't care as they have no jurisdiction, let alone interest, in the patentability of a drug.
In theory, a federal employee would be fired for taking any gift (even a lunch) from a vendor or anything that could even appear like a conflict of interests. These laws, however, were written to exclude the law-makers, themselves, from the limitations.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Copyright laws allow quoting, as long as it is within reasonable limits. Here, it most certainly is.
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Basically, writing code is like writing in a language that you where not taught as a child. But, for those of us that have embraced various programming languages to express our thoughts, which are actually fewer than I would expect. Writing code is only complicated to those that do not understand. To a real programmer (developer/engineer and some times architect) it is like writing a book. If you understand the problem, then just start typing and see what comes out, 90% of the time it will be correct.
If you don't understand the problem, then start typing. The reason I say this is that it will bring out the flaws in yore thinking and make if easier to find the solution.
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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Fast iterations to begin to see the logic play out and then loop back to alter your logic.
1. do a thing
2. check it against criteria
3. alter to fix things that aren't quite right
4. go back to 1
Also known as the OODA loop[^]:
It works!
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So, common since. Got it.
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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tldr; your message, and from skimming the content for sure the book.
skimming it "just coz it compiles it's not good code" yeah, but that takes him how many words?
Oh wait, that was not only the the first excerpt, two more excerpts that say... exactly the same thing using different words. Way to turn one single sentence into a whole book!
lets substitute "programs, programming" etc for cars, mechanic-ing (and of course the tools named etc), "The Secret Life of Vehicles: Understand Cars - Craft Better Transporters" - just as appropriate, let's fill the book up with how people have done it wrong -
... "just because it looks and moves like a car doesn't mean it's wise to use it on the road."
Now let's change it from cars to
- trading shares. Just Because you made a few pennies doesn't mean you should quit your job yet.
- Heart surgery: Just Because the patient woke doesn't mean it's going to last.
- Raising Children: Just Because they didn't starve doesn't mean they're good.
....
self righteous - make yourself look smart by pointing at other peoples failures.
thanks for the heads up, I know for sure it's not for my reading list.
(yeah I know some people like reading theory stuff,
some of us though have better things to do chores the missus told us to do.)
pestilence [ pes-tl-uh ns ] noun
1. a deadly or virulent epidemic disease. especially bubonic plague.
2. something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Synonyms: pest, plague, people
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And, here I just thought it was about craft that exists inside of work that so many often ignore. 
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yeah, I'm just not a book person
- at least not for books that tell me what I [think I ] already know.
but others do enjoy it, each to their own.
or maybe just wanted to get a daily rant out, no excuse really but semi-crap day today .... peace bro!
pestilence [ pes-tl-uh ns ] noun
1. a deadly or virulent epidemic disease. especially bubonic plague.
2. something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Synonyms: pest, plague, people
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I may pick up that book, and I might find a lot that I agree with. I am of that generation.
In a chat yesterday with a co-worker, I repeated one of my mantras that certainly is related to this thread: You should always strive to fully understand what is going on at least one layer below the one you interface to. He nodded: A far too high fraction of younger, newly educated guys are satisfied something that works, automagically, without the faintest clue of how it is done, not even immediately below the API surface.
But then...
In my days as a student, we learned about e.g. disk scheduling algorithms - FCFS, SSTF, elevator... - but in my first summer job as an intern, forty years ago, I learned that a computer system who had more than one pending disk transfer more than 5% of the time was severy overloaded. All this fancy disk queue sorting algorithms was 95+% of the time "sorting" an empty or 1-element list. We also learned about how to compose a good job mix - putting I/O intensive jobs together with CPU intensive ones to obtain as close to 100% utilization of each class of resources (in the Job Control Language you could give indicators of expected load on various resources). Time sharing, interactive terminals and such was a new thing, not yet mainstream.
Some knowledge gets outdated. Noone need to know disk scheduling, sectors, tracks and platters on a flash disk. Job scheduling is specialist knowledge for those who manage supercomputers. Knowing how to knit together a block of core can be fun at the computer museum, but it should not be treated as essential knowledge.
Some of what we learn in school is of the kind "know what is going on at least one layer down". We learn how 4-stroke and 2-stroke combustion engine work. More than half of the new cars sold in Norway this year will be electric ones. In my days, we learned the chemistry of silver photography. Today, the ordering time for darkroom materials (chemicals, paper) is weeks or months, you no longer have any use for that knowledge.
But you did. Not because you became a car mechanic or photo lab worker (you didn't), but to know how things work. Kids learned to play a keyboard with MIDI interface to become great musicians, but to get a ceratain feeling for how it is to perform music. They did learn to create music, at a certain level. I think that is valuable knowledge, even when it is only useful in family parties.
What attracted me to programming was way you (must) approach a problem: You just have to do it in a systematic and orderly way ... at a certain level. You must do things in the proper order. You must split the task into subtasks that can be solved one by one. I do not think of my first computer experiences as "programming", but as "orderly problem solving". Actually, for a few years I was evangelising programming for everybody not as a way to control a computer, but as a way to learn general problem solving methodologies, applicable in almost any problem area.
When I was teaching elementary programming (at college level), the "problem kids" were the self-taugt C gurus who "knew how to program". The easiest ones were those who had been playing with similar tools/toys, like visual languages. Today, programming an Arduino to make some LEDs flash would be fine - so different from large-scale programming that they don't think they are gurus. Yet, they have learned how to approach a problem in a somewhat systematic way.
I wouldn't turn down Blockly any more than I would turn down the piano playing of my neighbour's nine year old. They both represent the idea of knowing how things work, even if you are not the one who will be doing the real work.
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Very good points and a very interesting post.
Of course the short excerpts don't quite communicate everything the author is talking about.
I think the point is that :
In every realm where you learn there is often much more going on below the surface than you might think. Learn those foundational things and how to think about those things and you'll be stronger at whatever you do.
And for sure the "shortcut" types of things that help someone get introduced to a subject can be very good -- and the real problem may simply be that no one was there who told the person that "learning these things this way is just to stimulate interest, but don't believe you are going to play the Recorder[^] professionally, because there's not a lot of professional Recorder Concerts going on out there."
Of course, someone will post a youtube of the most famous Recorder Player who can play everything from Bach to Bon Jovi and that'll prove that Recorder concerts are going on everywhere.
I think the computer is a place where a lot of sub-activities are going on and you can be totally unaware and then learning those things can really help you understand things better. But, of course, this takes time and you can't just learn all of the subactivities and if you wait until you understand all of that the student will probably run away.
Good talk. 
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raddevus wrote: lobbying for legislation mandating that everybody learn to code in school.
The time, effort, and money would be better spent if they taught them science - in particular chemistry. Not deep dark chemistry but the chemistry involved in daily life and some enrichment beyond that - so they're not taken for suckers by scammers and politicians who make stuff up.
Why chemistry? Well, physics would also be good - but the current attitude vilifies chemistry and 'chemicals' - product making the preposterous claim they're 'chemical free'. Really - take a look around you and realize how little would be there without chemistry.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: Why chemistry? Well, physics would also be good
Yes, teaching them:
1. Critical thinking skills-- when you see something, ask what might be behind that something
2. Foundational things -- Matter is built out of atoms. Atoms have properties. Types of atoms behave particular ways. Some atoms form a gas that could kill you if you breathe it Cl or explode if you put it in water Na. If you mix certain atoms you get a compound and this compound may be safer (NaCl) or may burn a hole through you (HCl).
I like that the author is attempting to draw readers into the foundational things.
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used to be physics held things together and chemistry made it pretty
then chemistry invented explosions (often still pretty though).
[not to be outdone] physics made even bigger explosions (big enough that observers didn't notice what color it was).
biology: messing with diversity, genetic alteration, cloning...
computers: fraud, identity theft, fake news...
economics: rob the poor, overfeed the rich, money laundering...
...
science is dangerous and evil! ban it all!
lets just teach kids to be nice politically correct and other stupid fluff
for everything else there's google.
pestilence [ pes-tl-uh ns ] noun
1. a deadly or virulent epidemic disease. especially bubonic plague.
2. something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Synonyms: pest, plague, people
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lopatir wrote: lets just teach kids to be nice politically correct and other stupid fluff
Odd that you'd pick that - as I recall, the bible-pounders have been trying to ban (or more recently, corrupt) science.
Political Correctness (usually considered left-wing) can induce nausea - religious fervor (usually considered right-wing) is outright dangerous.
New rule for everyone: when you want to point out the flaws in "Them", do so while pointing into a mirror.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: Political Correctness (usually considered left-wing) can induce nausea - religious fervor (usually considered right-wing) is outright dangerous.
and thus a new battlefront was created!
would say more but got a mote stuck in my eye 
pestilence [ pes-tl-uh ns ] noun
1. a deadly or virulent epidemic disease. especially bubonic plague.
2. something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Synonyms: pest, plague, people
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