I know this has been said before, but...
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You of course! Only because I agree wholeheartedly. In all other respects I'm not qualified to remark on your intelligence. ;P
SPAM, the name disgusts/yet, pink is so enticing/and so, I swallow -
Richard, The name of this forum is "The Soapbox - off-topic rants"; I needed to vent, I vented. That being said, it is my belief that I've never disparaged anyone when answering their questions, and I've taken the time to answer even the most basic questions in several message boards. As you point out, no one can be an expert in every aspect of every technology, and sometimes we cannot even achieve complete expertise in areas in which we are totally focused. However, I believe that every programmer carries around a tacit knowledgebase and set of intuitions regarding problems, so that possibly, even subconsciously, we ask ourselves "can I figure this out, or shall I ask for help?" If our answer is the latter, at least when we ask a question, we start from a position of framing the question, and all tacit knowledge and intuition feed into that... you don't start by asking "How do I write a program?" You start by declaring "I am writing a program to do X, and as a part of that program, I need to do Y, which I'm not sure about... how do I do Y?" My frustration with some folks is that they are asking "How do I write a program?" . . . and the simplest questions are often the most difficult and time consuming to answer, possibly impossible to answer in a forum like this one. So, have a good day, and have a :beer:
John Kuhn wrote: I believe that every programmer carries around a tacit knowledgebase and set of intuitions regarding problems, so that possibly, even subconsciously, we ask ourselves "can I figure this out, or shall I ask for help?" If our answer is the latter, at least when we ask a question, we start from a position of framing the question, and all tacit knowledge and intuition feed into that As an experiment try asking 5 or 6 programmers that you respect to write a bubble sort, an insertion sort, and a quick sort in the language of their choice uing only primitives without consulting already written code. And if that is too much to ask then simply ask them to describe the alogrithms. As much as it saddens me to say so the days of the "real" programmer is just about over. Most of us today - and I include myself in this description - do not really "program". We evaluate a problem in terms of already written software and our solution set is predicated by that existing codebase. Seldom do we have to construct data structures of any real complexity or delve in the creation or modification of a new or existing algorithms. We are mainly concerned with the GUI and the formatting of the output - everything else is sacrificed on the altar of OOP or ease of maintainance or speed of development or some other thing that has no real place in programming as an art or a profession. How many remember the good old asm days when if you were programming some type of financial application you had to hand code a BCD routine to handle the floating point math - no math processor or even floating point primitives. Or remember when a programmer had to be conversant in binary, octal, and hex just to debug by single stepping thru an assembler. Not that I really miss those days but those of us that lived thru it have a different idea of "programming" than those whos first experience was with a high level language like Basic, pascal, or C++. Where was CP when we really needed it ? Richard "The man that hath not music in himself and is not moved with concord of sweet sounds is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; Let no man trust him." Shakespeare
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John Kuhn wrote: I believe that every programmer carries around a tacit knowledgebase and set of intuitions regarding problems, so that possibly, even subconsciously, we ask ourselves "can I figure this out, or shall I ask for help?" If our answer is the latter, at least when we ask a question, we start from a position of framing the question, and all tacit knowledge and intuition feed into that As an experiment try asking 5 or 6 programmers that you respect to write a bubble sort, an insertion sort, and a quick sort in the language of their choice uing only primitives without consulting already written code. And if that is too much to ask then simply ask them to describe the alogrithms. As much as it saddens me to say so the days of the "real" programmer is just about over. Most of us today - and I include myself in this description - do not really "program". We evaluate a problem in terms of already written software and our solution set is predicated by that existing codebase. Seldom do we have to construct data structures of any real complexity or delve in the creation or modification of a new or existing algorithms. We are mainly concerned with the GUI and the formatting of the output - everything else is sacrificed on the altar of OOP or ease of maintainance or speed of development or some other thing that has no real place in programming as an art or a profession. How many remember the good old asm days when if you were programming some type of financial application you had to hand code a BCD routine to handle the floating point math - no math processor or even floating point primitives. Or remember when a programmer had to be conversant in binary, octal, and hex just to debug by single stepping thru an assembler. Not that I really miss those days but those of us that lived thru it have a different idea of "programming" than those whos first experience was with a high level language like Basic, pascal, or C++. Where was CP when we really needed it ? Richard "The man that hath not music in himself and is not moved with concord of sweet sounds is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; Let no man trust him." Shakespeare
Well, we've certainly wandered far afield from my moment of frustration seeking an easy outlet. As I read your response, then re-read it, I was at first at a loss for words. Later on, my curiousity grew. I began to wonder about the nature of computing and its somewhat quasi-scientific standing as a field of knowledge; it has been my feeling for a long time that programming is part science, part engineering and part craftmanship or artwork. So, I must ask: do you feel that computer programming as a field of knowledge has made progress since the days of hand-coding assembly? And if so, is it better or worse off for the growth and expansion of our knowledge? I, presumably like many others, learned sorting, linked lists, trees, data structures and common algorithms in high school and college computer science courses. Today, after many years, I have rarely had the opportunity or cause to apply those ideas to my work, and I may fall into the experimental group you hypothesize would fail to answer a simple question regarding sorting algorithms. I have been using high-level tools and languages that incorporate tools and features that encapsulate such functions, or eliminate the need altogether, for quite a while. So, it is my impression that these tools and languages, and the references that accompany them, and the body of knowledge available to all of us through books, products, internet and our peers, make us more capable and more productive, and free us from having to re-invent what has come before, and allows us to stand on the shoulders of those who have come before; in short, there is such as thing as progress, and in our case, progress is good. Then again, I could be wrong.
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I just have to say this, even though I know it has been said by others... GET A BOOK. READ THE HELP. SEARCH THE WEB. Then, when you still can't figure it out, come here and ask everyone what they think your problem might be. I just had to get that out. :beer:
Every time I go into the Visual C++ forum[^], I end up saying the same thing: RTFMSDN[^]!
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Every time I go into the Visual C++ forum[^], I end up saying the same thing: RTFMSDN[^]!
Software Zen:
delete this;