[LRUG] The puzzling phenomenon of the Rails dev who hardly knows Ruby

[Nicholas Johnson]

Hi Steve, Nothing wrong with SO, but I see a lot of people using it as
their first recourse without trying first to solve the problem themselves.
In the long term, they don't learn, they get left behind, and it becomes a
trap that's hard to escape from because they are expected to be able to do
more than they ever learned how to do. They spend the rest of their career
hiding their lack of skill. It's a real thing, and very sad to see.

If I need a canonical solution to something though, SO is definitely part
of my toolkit.

On 6 July 2016 at 16:58, Steve <steve.laing at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it's commonplace to copy and paste from Stack Overflow and there
> are many valid reasons to do so. For example, to avoid wasting time
> reinventing the wheel on a common problem. I'd say we're all copy and paste
> programmers at some point in the day or at least in our careers.
> It's also common to start out working with Rails rather than purely with
> Ruby, that's no bad thing, if you know enough to get the work you can
> progress to learning the underlying language.
> A while ago people would know the Java API by heart, taking Sun
> Certification (TM) exams to prove it, it didn't automatically make them
> great Spring developers.
> My point being we often start out learning the most practical thing to get
> us work.
>
> On 6 July 2016 at 16:14, Nicholas Johnson <me at nicholasjohnson.com> wrote:
>
>> Two words - Stack Overflow. When someone is a copy-paste programmer, they
>> can get quite a lot done quite quickly, and come over as proficient to the
>> untrained managerial eye, but if anything unexpected happens they will be
>> lost. I sometimes work with quite old programmers who have been
>> copy-pasters all their lives and are terrified someone will find out. It's
>> actually quite horrible for them.
>>
>> On 6 July 2016 at 12:36, gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I hear of this a lot - the Rails dev who hardly knows Ruby and I'm left
>>> scratching my head. How on earth can anyone become proficient in a complex
>>> framework like Rails without understanding the language it's written in?
>>>
>>> Someone please enlighten me.
>>>
>>> gvim
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> *Nicholas Johnson (Personal)*
>> www.nicholasjohnson.com
>> me at nicholasjohnson.com
>>
>> *The Drift Chronicles (Novel)*
>> driftchronicles.com
>>
>> *Forward Advance Ltd (Work)*
>> www.forwardadvance.com
>> nicholas at forwardadvance.com
>> skype: nicholas_ah_johnson
>>
>>
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>
>
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-- 
*Nicholas Johnson (Personal)*
www.nicholasjohnson.com
me at nicholasjohnson.com

*The Drift Chronicles (Novel)*
driftchronicles.com

*Forward Advance Ltd (Work)*
www.forwardadvance.com
nicholas at forwardadvance.com
skype: nicholas_ah_johnson
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