The Internet: A dying resource for developers.
6 04 Nov 2015 22:58 by u/roznak
When I started with programming we got these books together with the floppy disks.
Later blog posts and Internet resources became the source to develop code.
But when you now Google for a problem, the only interesting pages appear to be from 2009 and older. There is no new content anymore that actually helps young developers.
8 comments
7 u/roselan 05 Nov 2015 02:14
I respectfully disagree.
There so much resources online. Between youtube lectures, so, github, and online interpreters (like jsfiddle) alone, i simply can't keep up.
And in recent years there has been stuff like rust, meteor, datomic, streams, transpilers, and tooling improved bounds and leaps (jetbrains/vs, git, jira/trello, webpack, linters).
Diving in a book was a different experience, you learnt how to do stuff before understanding the why. For me the main issue is more sorting through the click-baitey blogs and the sheer amount of stuff. But for god sake, now there are programming languages dedicated to help kids learn. I can't tell if the quality of young programmers did improve thou, as my sample size of padawans is way too small.
Computer science itself is slow moving, we might get a shiny new js framework each week, but fundamentals are quite engraved. Allocation (immutability/concurrency), language types (functional, imperative, etc) have seen no real evolution. Few have the opportunity to implement the real new stuff like weak ia.
I don't know what programming language you are using, but i doubt you are "stuck with 2009 problems", and I have a hard time understanding your feeling, or what you envision the situation should be.
1 u/WhiteRonin 05 Nov 2015 02:23
We have definitely moved forward but also at same time still rely on the same principals of programming that pascal (lol! Forgot about those hard tabs!), fortran and lisp.
But at the same time, I'm seeing a lot of convergence, especially in web languages. PHP has gotten so much better in the last 2 years that ruby and Python are becoming a lifestyle choice compared to a better choice.
Design patterns are also becoming a thing that more people understand besides hard core Java people.
Still miss books though :-)
2 u/WhiteRonin 04 Nov 2015 23:16
By the time books are published the new flavor of the day is already 2 years stale!
In the php world Laravel was just exiting 3.x and today is already on 5.1.x. The PDF book writers just can't keep up. PHP itself is going from 5.3/5.4 2 years ago to the latest 7 (6 got skipped).
StackOverflow and communities are way more helpful.
Note: I saved my first program that I copied out of a magazine on casset tape :-D
1 u/roznak [OP] 04 Nov 2015 23:18
You also started to count in decades. LOL
0 u/WhiteRonin 05 Nov 2015 00:28
Lol! Nope just in how many revisions of Space Invaders have come out since I discovered what quarters were first useful for :-) later on, I learned they could be fun in more deadly ways!