"Eric Brunson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > It seems like new programmers today expect to be spoonfed their > information like they were in grammar school.
I think its true they expect a lot of tutorial stuff, probably because of the number of idiot guides to programming in languages like VB/PHP etc. Also relatively few of todays programmers are formally trained (college or higher) in programming, math, computers, etc. In fact many seem to consider it surprising that people might expect them to need University level training to program some so "simple" as a computer! It's just typing after all... :-) > is to hack a Makefile to get a package to compile or break out an > RFC to > understand a protocol. Many try but can't understand the terminology. One of the things I tried to do in my tutorial is teach enough of the jargon that newvbies could read an RFC or a language reference and understand it! > If you don't understand something and the > documentation is lacking, then strap on a pair and read the source, I admit thats always been a last resort for me. I was brought up in a mainframe and embedded systems environment where documentation was almost always excellent, accurate and complete. Similarly designs were documented such that you rarely needed to refer to the code to find bugs until you were down to a single procedure/function, and often a particular segment of that (a case statement say). When I moved to Unix I was initially shocked to discover that most big Unix sites had a copy of the AT&T or BSD code and it was considered normal to resolve issues by reading it! Then I got involved with PCs and discovered that not only the OS but the BIOS code came with it (the original IBM PC I mean - the one that cost $2500 for a single 5.25 floppy disk version!) Reading assembler wasn't a problem but the idea that I might need to just to get the floppy disk to work was astounding! > Just me being a grouchy old programmer. In my day we had to program > in > 4 feet of snow, uphill... both ways! Actually I often feel that todays programming is like that. And in many ways its much harder with the web - a truly terrible programming environment! and GUIs - how many frameworks do you know? and tools that do their best to hide what's going on - IDEs that don't let you see or modify the dependency tree? I don't think the problems facing programmers today are, in balance, harder or easier than they were when I started programming 25-30 years ago but they are different. Alan G. Scratching his grey beard :-) _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor