It’s crazy to think about. We are nearing the end of the age where people who have been programming for “20 years this year” and self-taught probably learned to program from books. In the next few years, people who have been “programming for 20 years” might start to include YouTube learners and boot campers.
As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/paste. You had to type every listing in to get it running, as well as find that semi-colon you forgot on line 16,46,102 of 200. Then you had to remember everything, take notes, and literally research answers. You couldn’t just ask a random person on the internet, at least for a few years after I learned how to program when online forums became a thing.
One big difference I can think of between my younger peers and myself: When I see an error message, I take it as a “hint that something is wrong” where my younger peers tend to take error messages literally. Probably because I “grew up” with terrible error messages that hardly ever pointed to the actual file/line the error was on.
I’ve been programming for 10 years, and as you’d expect know a lot of people with a few more or less years programming.
I think all the “kids these days” gripes only apply to people’s first few years. You can argue they’re formative, but most professional programmers will quickly need to evolve beyond “take message literally, ask online for help, paste error message into google/SO” to be good at their jobs. I don’t know anybody beyond entry level who operates like that.
I rarely take things literally like you said (though I may start by giving it the benefit of the doubt), I always just check the actual code from the thing emitting the error message, read the source of libraries I’m using, seek out documentation. It just so happens I can do all of that from my computer rather than doing some of it with a book.
I've had the unfortunate luck of working with a couple of people with "senior" in their title that once faced with an error message from a open source library, starts their troubleshooting with searching for the error message and if nothing comes up, opens a issue on the issue tracker and then wait. They didn't even consider digging into the source code of the library to figure things out themselves.
I haven't worked with a lot of people like that, but enough to guess that there is quite a bit of people who work that way.
To me, it is only an issue if they sit still after and do not start to work on something else. But I am unashamed to admit that if I don't find the error in github/gitlab issue tracker, and if it seems to take more than 20 minute to investigate, I'll open an issue then move on (if I already know the library, if it's new to me, I'll assume Pebkac for at least two hour and try to rubber duck the issue)
Depending on how much you have on your plate, this is ideal from a time management perspective. Knowing when and how to delegate is a very important skill. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that it's a good use of your time.
But it's true that after a point, the only errors left are the ones that can only be resolved by reading the documentation and experience (only 4 DELETE per hour, and you throw me an undocumented 503 error? Really?), and llm can't really do it for you.
Yeah, I've been doing the coding crap for money for just a tad over 44 years. I've literally had 4 complete software careers, each lasting a over a decade, and each being riding one of the tech waves: early 70's-mid 80's 3D graphics, then console video games, then VFX for film, then facial recognition and now AI. Since getting my OpenAI key and working with my own implementation of static Diffusion I have to say my ambition has also increased. As someone with this span of experience, I want some type of youth syrum so I can see where this all goes and participate. It's fucking fun, amazing, daunting, and engaging.
Don't forget the ones who learned to program from colorful 1980s Usborne BASIC books. (Also with no copy/paste, and having to use a tape cassette to save the listing.)
The Amstrad CPC 464 had a "copy cursor" and a "copy" key. Holding down shift and using the arrow keys let you navigate a second cursor to text you wanted to copy, then the "copy" key would insert the letter under the copy cursor at your insert cursor and advance both cursors forward one character.
The C64 wasn't as good a BASIC environment. You can overwrite text in a program listing and press ENTER to update a line, which can copy a line if you can squeeze in a new number.
Neither were as good as Acorn's BASIC.
For a couple of years in secondary school, my alarm was a program I wrote every night on my CPC 464. My tape drive was broken, so I had to type every program in fresh. If I wanted to wake up in the morning, I'd write a nested loop over the hours and minutes and start playing sound.
Ah, I almost had a knee-jerk response to remind you that the Turbo Vision IDE very much had copy and paste 30+ years ago – and then I understood what you meant.
One of my cousins learnt to program as a teenager in Argentina, before the web. He told me about the difficulty of finding programming information over there. Apparently, people who knew any kind of programming had paid dearly to get that knowledge and in turned charged others for that knowledge. Needless to say, there were not many programmers in the country at the time.
In comparison, today's generation has access to vast libraries of knowledge.
I mean yeah I read all those books and I've skimmed a few programming videos over the decades. But I've only really learned programming from working with a handful of exceptional mentors over the years. I've eaten a lot of crappy dog food on projects just to get to spend more time with those individuals.
> my younger peers tend to take error messages literally.
Interesting, because to me there still seem to be many public discussion forum questions where the answer is "Have you tried doing exactly what the error message is telling you?"
I’m talking about self-taught. I also took comp-sci after learning to program and I learned a lot I didn’t know. So I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing that education.
As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/paste. You had to type every listing in to get it running, as well as find that semi-colon you forgot on line 16,46,102 of 200. Then you had to remember everything, take notes, and literally research answers. You couldn’t just ask a random person on the internet, at least for a few years after I learned how to program when online forums became a thing.
One big difference I can think of between my younger peers and myself: When I see an error message, I take it as a “hint that something is wrong” where my younger peers tend to take error messages literally. Probably because I “grew up” with terrible error messages that hardly ever pointed to the actual file/line the error was on.