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by kibwen 3741 days ago
We Google them, which is an impossible task for non-alphabetic symbols. :P
2 comments

I wonder at what point people started to expect that search engines can instantly provide all the answers to everything worth knowing. The correct place to find a word you don't know is a dictionary. The correct place to find a symbol in code that you don't know is the definition in the source code (or language reference if it's baked in), or simply ask someone who knows.
Asking someone you know is not an approach that scales in the large, and suggesting that all answers can be divined from source both assumes a level of mastery that cannot be expected (e.g. the difficulty of reading the source of C++'s Boost library vs. reaching for the extensive documentation) and denies the existence of questions such as "when is it appropriate to use this operator?" or "what is the worst-case runtime complexity of this operation?"