I hate quibbling with a question's premise, but dang, this one is whack.
SO does not teach you how to program. It gives you upvoted answers to specific questions people have.
Would you try to become a doctor by reading common questions and upvoted answers to medical issues? Of course not. Sure, after you were a doctor, such game-playing might be useful -- but only as something extra, not as the skill itself.
I was just leading a team two hours ago through some group coding, and we ran into a problem. "Let's Google it!" we all said, and sure enough, other people had the same problem.
But the top three results? They were bogus. The authors didn't understand the error, so the questions they posed were vague and out-of-context. The people answering the problem were just as bad, only some of these wrong answers to wrong questions got quite a few votes! And why not? The internet is a game you play for points.
I was fortunate that I knew the answer before we started. I was just curious to see how it played out.
It did not play out well.
You learn to program by somehow climbing inside of somebody else's head and learning to think like they do while they program There are various ways to do this: read lots of books, watch videos, spend time pairing up in a computer lab on campus. None of them involve playing hit-and-miss Q&A with the internet. Sure, it's fun, and yes, it gives you a bunch of answers to specific problems you didn't have before. But it's got jack shit to do with programming.
Remember those old haunted house games from the 90s? Where you had to thrash around until you finally came up with the magic phrase? Something like "pick up the lamp from the corner". Once you got the phrase right, you could proceed.
Lotta folks think programming is like that. It is not.
In fact, when I look at a lot of the crap that passes for programming, most of it is due to coders on a time budget thrashing around online, copying and pasting whatever they think might work. And they never come back to clean anything up.
Why refactor if your idea of programming is simply making the compiler work and something half-way acceptable appearing in the results? I'd argue that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of people claiming to be programmers today are, in fact, people who aren't afraid of the machine and know how to Google. (And what usually happens to these folks if they are successful is that they end up in corporate jobs where they do less and less programming and become more and more afraid of breaking anything)
SO does not teach you how to program. It gives you upvoted answers to specific questions people have.
Would you try to become a doctor by reading common questions and upvoted answers to medical issues? Of course not. Sure, after you were a doctor, such game-playing might be useful -- but only as something extra, not as the skill itself.
I was just leading a team two hours ago through some group coding, and we ran into a problem. "Let's Google it!" we all said, and sure enough, other people had the same problem.
But the top three results? They were bogus. The authors didn't understand the error, so the questions they posed were vague and out-of-context. The people answering the problem were just as bad, only some of these wrong answers to wrong questions got quite a few votes! And why not? The internet is a game you play for points.
I was fortunate that I knew the answer before we started. I was just curious to see how it played out.
It did not play out well.
You learn to program by somehow climbing inside of somebody else's head and learning to think like they do while they program There are various ways to do this: read lots of books, watch videos, spend time pairing up in a computer lab on campus. None of them involve playing hit-and-miss Q&A with the internet. Sure, it's fun, and yes, it gives you a bunch of answers to specific problems you didn't have before. But it's got jack shit to do with programming.
Remember those old haunted house games from the 90s? Where you had to thrash around until you finally came up with the magic phrase? Something like "pick up the lamp from the corner". Once you got the phrase right, you could proceed.
Lotta folks think programming is like that. It is not.
In fact, when I look at a lot of the crap that passes for programming, most of it is due to coders on a time budget thrashing around online, copying and pasting whatever they think might work. And they never come back to clean anything up.
Why refactor if your idea of programming is simply making the compiler work and something half-way acceptable appearing in the results? I'd argue that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of people claiming to be programmers today are, in fact, people who aren't afraid of the machine and know how to Google. (And what usually happens to these folks if they are successful is that they end up in corporate jobs where they do less and less programming and become more and more afraid of breaking anything)