The Youth Of Today
Posted by Chris Shorrock Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:20:00 GMT
As someone who is probably still considered a youth by most of the general public (26), or at least I can fool myself into thinking that until I hit 30, I can't help but wonder what the current state of the programming world is doing to the kids just coming up in the world.
I'll probably receive some email from someone stating since I've never worked with punch cards I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'll ignore that for now. In the good'ole days there were no fancy IDE's and there certainly wasn't any fancy programming concepts like agile development processes or extreme programming(whether or not I buy into these is another issue). I'm a strong believer that this type of environment fostered some very valuable skills.
Now don't get me wrong, I work with an IDE and it does save me a bunch of time, but the time I put in with a text editor and a command line taught me more than I can imagine. Failure is the best teacher, and if we're not allowed to fail because our IDE picks it up right away, or we have someone sitting behind us watching every character we type how much are we really learning? Is this process efficient? Of course is isn't, but the time spent struggling with a stupid problem will pay of later when you're getting paid to work and you avoid that problem all together. So am I suggesting that people just starting out programming should avoid automated tools all together? Well, yes, until you're getting paid the process is more important than the end result, allow yourself to fail.
I had a friend (sorry Dan) who I started my first job with who literally spent about 3 hours trying to debug the following piece of code (simplified in Java for presentation purposes):
while(expression.is_valid() && null != name); {
Log.info( "Why doesn't this work" );
} The astute (or even half-asleep) reader will see the extra semicolon and pick up why the log statement was never reached. But the time spent solving this problem taught him a valuable lesson that wouldn't of been learned had he been doing this in today's modern IDEs.
That's my message for the younger generation. Give a man an automation tools and you'll feed him for a day, teach a man how to write automation tools and you'll feed him for life. And with all that said I'll leave you with some humorous images of todays generation (my wife is a teacher):
