One can argue that any programming is computer science,
One could argue that, but I think it would be a weak argument.
Keeping within the subcategory of software, I think of computer science as the theoretical side and programming as the practical side. The same distinction is sometimes made in other fields, like physics.
Seems to me that the author saw a show written by people with a narrow and shallow understanding of the field. For better or for worse, it happens on TV all the time. If he wants to demonstrate a widespread disconnect in the software community, there are probably better examples out there.
(disclaimer: I haven’t read the article, I’m just replying to you because your comment was interesting)
I think your theoretical vs practical framing is useful, but as a (non-computer-)scientist, I find it fascinating to consider how a biomedical scientist uses programming compared to someone whose background is much more grounded on the compsci/IT/programming side.[1]
[1]: I sometimes joke that, compared to many of my scientist colleagues, I am an exceptional programmer, and this says a lot about the average quality of the code that scientists tend to write when they don’t have much dedicated training or experience in programming
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I thought ambagious was a typo of ambiguous. New word day!
Yeah, that tracks.
At work someone estimated adding a section of static content to a page that uses React as 3 story points.
They were searching for components that would style the header and paragraph elements just as they wanted them, but were coming up short.
Instead I simply added it with html elements and a couple of lines of CSS.
5 minutes. Done.
😐
Holding their hand through one page in vanilla JS is a great investment in your junior dev if this is an issue
I swear this isn’t a get off my lawn post
Proceeds to spend 5 paragraphs complaining about what people call the original Javascript. He has some valid points, but this is very much an older developer complaining about the new generation of devs.
new generation of devs
The new generation of devs sadly has a lot of people that only can type what they want to achieve into ChatGPT and blindly copy whatever code snippet it comes up with. But they can’t develop. Nor do they understand code written by others. They’re the reason things like NodeJS’s is-even package exists.
This isn’t the new generation of devs. This is just new devs. Some people refuse to grow out of this stage.
New devs generally suck, I sucked a lot.
The problem I fear today is that there are more crutches new devs can rely on, until they can’t.
And it’s not a sharp boundary between getting by and not being able to work it
The main issue is that not a lot of companies want and do take the time to train less experienced devs. Every company is expecting new hires to be trained already.
So many new devs need to scrape by with whatever means they have. And it is true is a lot of industries.
College computer programming programs normally do not train people to immediately work, unless the students spend thousands of hours coding on their own. Most comp sci students avoid this.
So, when a new dev graduates and they did not do that extra work, then the first year of paid work is them putting in those hours while being paid rather than doing it for free
More crutches is definitely a problem. Personally, after vocally refusing to use chatgpt for months, my boss has now sat me down and told me to use it because it “halves his development time”.
My colleague and boss use it constantly. Guess whose job has become mostly debugging their code when they can’t get it to work and don’t know why?
That is very frustrating !
I’ve heard of the term “expert beginners”.
Published 8 years ago
I didn’t know that the new generation of developers were that far along in their careers already.
We’ve been saying that about new devs since there became a second generation of devs
Except when I was a new dev, it was blindly copying stuff from stack overflow
In Phaedrus, Socrates talks about the invention of writing:
“it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
This is a generalization that has some merit. but ultimately, generalizing an entire group of people and making assumptions about them isn’t a good way to judge an individuals ability to code.
See what they can do, and then judge.
You must have missed the part where I said a lot of people, not all of them. There are people calling themselves “developer” that shine during the hiring process, but then can’t implement a random feature if there’s no ready-to-use library for it.
However, this doesn’t mean that there still aren’t lots of actual developers around, that know what they’re doing and can actually code in an actual programming language.
If you want to play true Scotsman, the embedded devs like to make fun of the web devs for being scared of bitfields and refusing to do logic with anything other than string matching and manipulation.
. . .
Secretly it’s partially because we’re absolutely terrified of strings in any form and simply refuse to use them.
There are a lot of sub disciplines to the field, some benefit a lot from GPT or blindly copying from SA, some don’t, but that’s ok either way. Keep your skill sets broad and you’ll survive.
