age of Python programmers

[Reid Nichol]

My jaw just dropped.

School-mates not continually learning, man, have I been there.  After I 
graduated, I coded C++ just for fun as a hobby thing (required by the 
BeAPI).  Every once in while the class got together for a supper or 
lunch and we talked (of course) about what we've been up to.  One girl 
mentioned that she was coding C++.  I asked her some questions about 
what she was doing and all I got was a "deer in headlights" look and a 
smile.  She just looked at the others and made the "over the head" 
gesture.  I fully wanted to know and learn something.  After all, she 
was doing this professionally, but there was nothing there.  No wounder 
most software is crap nowadays.

But installing word for data conversions, amoung those others?  All I 
have is sympathy.  'Tis a sad state of affairs indeed.


Andrea Griffini wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 01:07:01 -0500, Reid Nichol
> <rnichol_rrc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Perhaps it's just 
>>where I went to school though or where I hang out, but it can't all be 
>>coincidence.
> 
> 
> IMO it's no coincidence. I think that *most* professional
> programmers are not regular readers of usenet newsgroups
> about the languages they use... not only that... IMO in
> the bigger part they don't actually know what usenet
> newsgroups are. And most didn't even read any book on the
> languages and tools they use unless that happened when
> they were still at school.
> 
> I decided that for myself I'll always cut out enough time
> to keep studying. But many just go forever with what they
> learned when they were forced to because of an exam.
> 
> I've personally lived totally absurd situations where
> experienced programmers were just spending a lot of time
> and energy (and were making a lot of mistakes) because
> they never heard about make tools. I'm NOT kidding.
> 
> I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... ;-)
> MS Word macros taking ages and requiring superservers
> (yes... they were installing office purposely to
> superservers so that MS word could use that RAM to be
> able to load the file to convert) to do data conversions
> that someone knowing perl wouldn't even save the script
> for (but would just invoke perl with "-e").
> 
> This is no joke. I was consulted for help when the word
> macro stopped working complaining first about being unable
> to "undo" changes and then crashing ms word anyway after.
> 
> 
> Looks like keeping studying, observing and "learning" is
> considered "out" by many of my collegues.
> 
> Andrea