ＧＯＯＤ ＧＲＩＥＦ

They will call us all (including pacifist libertarian wimps like myself) "Nazis", and they will try to sabotage us in any way that they can!

I'm delighted that "pacifist libertarian wimps" are waking up to this. If it's not explicitly for us, it'll eventually be taken away from us. Such is the determination of communist infiltrators.

Greater security from using software components from people you can trust, and more like-minded high-IQ eyeballs on the incoming code.

I'd never thought about this aspect, but another effect of a baked-in, "this is for us" philosophy might be that we stop regarding projects as these ambiguous, public entities that nobody is really responsible for. Like, how do you have an investment in the software if you don't have an investment in its users?

Maybe we didn't. Maybe that "we can just fork" attitude is as self-destructive a form of white flight as the attitude of "we'll just move away from the diversity" until there's nowhere left to run.

...oh balls, Im replying to a three week old thread.

Good grief. That was high school and not college, right?

I'm self-taught and now self-employed. I'm honestly not sure what advice I should give, since my own process was ludicrously hare-brained. An exercise in doing everything wrong. I floundered through a bunch of C tutorials for a few months, and the energy I wasted spinning my wheels and beating my head against compiler errors could've covered so much more ground if only I'd had a mentor to clear up the fundamental misunderstandings I'd had.

Like, to begin with, I didn't really understand what a compiler is, versus an IDE. I thought I needed the latter, whereas it's really just something to make using the compiler easier. I didn't understand that the idea of a "language" is really fairly abstract, whereas a compiler is the realization of what a language is specified to be. I didn't know about the shell, I wasn't on *nix, and suffered less for not knowing about these things, as for not knowing that these were important things to know about.

I didn't know what I didn't know, in other words.

So, #1 is to seek guidance from a human being, and not some bugshit tutorial website.

2 is my own subjective preference: On Lisp by Paul Graham. That's what made everything click, and turned my view of programming from a vocational skill for pajeets, to something almost transcendent. Wizard magic. An infinite frontier littered with the cast-off monoliths of people smarter than me. Common Lisp isn't typically an OSDev lang, but the point of the book is to teach you how to think about programming in terms of language construction rather than the bare mechanics of a particular language, like how to subclass Loo to have a 'poo' method.

3: If you're not already, become conversant with mathematics, and in particular learn linear algebra now rather than down the line when you find that not being able to understand math is a serious roadblock.

As a hobbyist programmer, I thought the joke was going to be the opposite. Some first year CS kid asks a question and gets a pajeet demanding to know his rationale only to reveal later that he doesn't know the answer regardless of context. The thread is subsequently closed for being subjective.

If only I knew how bad things actually are.