[jared314]

> Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work.

Nope. I remember specifically copying from known solutions in large organized reams of marked paper (a "book" we called it). They used to have whole rooms, and personnel, dedicated to storing them. Now, you couldn't just ask for what you wanted, like "clojurescript core.async examples". Oh, no. Research required either knowing how to search through the "books" or remembering previous solutions to similar problems. (And, I'm not that old.)

[nissimk]

Yes, exactly, the old saying goes: RTFM (Read The Fine* Manual). In the 21st century google is the manual. If you're not looking stuff up in google, you're doing it wrong. It's great if you can do some stuff without using google, but memorizing reference material doesn't mean you're a better developer.

[hackinthebochs]

I argue that it does: the more you have committed to memory of the basic units of your environment, the expotentially more efficient you will be, and simultaneously the greater problems you will be capable of solving.

Think of programming as speaking in a language. He who has more of the language committed to memory will be orders of magnitude greater at communicating in that language than someone who has to look up every odd word. Furthermore, the concepts that can be created will be much more complex and abstract than the person who doesn't have a handle on the basics: people who are clever and quick-witted in a language they are fluent in will often seem dull in a language they don't know well. Having the basics committed to memory is absolutely critical. Its unfortunately that this level of mastery has been devalued with the rise of the "just google it" culture.

[writtles]

True, but there are also other brilliant minds in the field that are creating solutions that you can also learn from. Isolating yourself from that doesn't help much either.

[franze]

also there were magazines with full working programs (sometimes event 4 to 5 pages of "beautiful" BASIC) that you manually copied - letter by letter, number by number - into a trusted C64 (or other pre-historic computer thingie).

[nissimk]

I miss those. We should bring that back. Now there is github with tons of sources but very few explanatory paragraphs to help understand the reasoning behind the design or implementation. I've seen a number of devops blogs where there are posts with snippets of command lines and config files explaining how to get some software set up in difficult configurations, but it would be interesting to see development blogs with the same kind of depth including links to github source. I'm working on some ideas for something like that. Hopefully I'll really get started on it soon.