[smoyer]

"Learn X in Y minutes" is an awesome concept! Let me know if you ever decide to run with it. I guess I don't fit the CoffeeScript is a hipster language profile very well but I still enjoy writing code in it ;)

I basically agree with everything you've said (in both posts) ... you can be successful while wasting cycles. And if you're working on a low-volume and/or internal only application, you'll probably never face the limits of a modern server.

If you need to operate "at web scale" [1], or run into an uncommon (or common) bug, you'll need to know more about the frameworks and systems you're code relies on (e.g. MongoDB configuration for systems over 2GB [2]). Blog posts like the one referenced are completely unfair to those that developed MongoDB - read the manual and understand how MongoDB works OR use it at your own risk.

So I'll switch arguments and help you make your point. We have an application written in Oracle's Application Express - while we have extensive expertise in Oracle's database software, we have this one system which was completed for expediency's sake. It's kind of horrific but (mostly) works at the scale required. It would be financially foolish to dig into more deeply into ApEx for this one dead-end application. Everyone is happy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs (audio NSFW)

[2] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...

[logicallee]

Thanks for the reply! (I didn't actually build those tutorials, i.e. learn x in y is another person's site, like I said I only spent a couple of hours on the concept of a site like this and the current tutorials are external. I did add the time analysis.)

I like your final example - and remember, you guys are Oracle experts: you're the most qualified people on the planet to learn ApEx properly from scratch, even though you haven't.

Now switch gears and imagine a college student who just has an idea for some cool project, but barely codes in any language. This describes the computing needs of 3 billion people. They're not qualified to quickly become experts and engineers at anything. But they still have a computer in front of them that does a trillion operations every few minutes. The gulf between using that to surf facebook or building... anything at all, even very poorly, is immense. (Like git that you can learn in 15 seconds, versus manually copying and renaming files for version control.) Thanks for the encouragement.