On Sunday, 18 July 2021 at 01:49:11 UTC, Brian Tiffin wrote:
It's our best hope. Self taught programming is scary. School
taught programming is scary. Corporate taught programming is
scary. *Practice makes perfect? No, practice makes permanent.*
The sanest path forward for the profession is Peer taught
programming, in public.
I am a self-taught programmer well before college, furthermore, I
am *almost* a self-taught guy in everything that interests me
(albeit the fact that I have a degree in electronics
engineering), but I am *not*, in *any way*, ashamed to ask
anything no matter the issue, I have no pride when I am asking
questions, I am not ashamed to answer no when I don't have the
answer, I want to learn, and to teach whenever I feel I have and
edge on something.
That being said, one of the things that I felt in love with when
I was first exposed to was OOP; with all its pros and cons. OOP
made me a far better programmer than I was before. And it was not
in college nor anywhere near to, it was on one of my first jobs
as a developer at a financial institution which by the time back
in the early 90s was using a database manager called FoxPro wich
evolved to Visual FoxPro by the time Microsoft bought it and it
was fully OOP from top to bottom and was far ahead of similar
tools of the era, so far ahead in the language and flexibility
and speed that a few years after it was released Microsoft killed
it because a lot of companies were doing serious business with it
while *not buying* Microsoft's star-database, SQL Server, which
obviously was far far expensive.
It was with this tool that I learned primarily to encapsulate
everything -and it payed off; code quality using OOP was far
superior. These were my humble origins to OOP far away from
things like LISP and what-not that I didn't know they even
existed. C++ came afterward with all its complexity and 50% of
the guys loving it and the other 50% hating it with passion. I
don't know of any other language so divisive than C++. And no, I
don't love it nor hate it, I respect it, it is powerful, the
problem with C++ is that anyone writing code with it feels the
need to show you how big has his ... and you came across
constructions that seem complex puzzles; so, in practice, unless
you have some guidelines cast in stone at company level, you end
fighting the language, or more precisely, the ones coding with
the language.
