[Tutor] Shelve del not reducing file size

[Alan Gauld]

"Eric Brunson" <brunson at brunson.com> wrote

> It seems like new programmers today expect to be spoonfed their
> information like they were in grammar school.

I think its true they expect a lot of tutorial stuff, probably because
of the number of idiot guides to programming in languages like
VB/PHP etc.

Also relatively few of todays programmers are formally trained
(college or higher) in programming, math, computers, etc. In fact
many seem to consider it surprising that people might expect them
to need University level training to program some so "simple" as
a computer! It's just typing after all... :-)

> is to hack a Makefile to get a package to compile or break out an 
> RFC to
> understand a protocol.

Many try but can't understand the terminology. One of the things I 
tried
to do in my tutorial is teach enough of the jargon that newvbies could
read an RFC or a language reference and understand it!

> If you don't understand something and the
> documentation is lacking, then strap on a pair and read the source,

I admit thats always been a last resort for me. I was brought up in
a mainframe and embedded systems environment where documentation
was almost always excellent, accurate and complete. Similarly designs
were documented such that you rarely needed to refer to the code
to find bugs until you were down to a single procedure/function, and
often a particular segment of that (a case statement say). When I 
moved
to Unix I was initially shocked to discover that most big Unix sites 
had
a copy of the AT&T or BSD code and it was considered normal to resolve
issues by reading it!

Then I got involved with PCs and discovered that not only the OS but 
the
BIOS code came with it (the original IBM PC I mean - the one that cost
$2500 for a single 5.25 floppy disk version!) Reading assembler wasn't
a problem but the idea that I might need to just to get the floppy 
disk
to work was astounding!

> Just me being a grouchy old programmer.  In my day we had to program 
> in
> 4 feet of snow, uphill... both ways!

Actually I often feel that todays programming is like that. And in 
many
ways its much harder with the web - a truly terrible programming 
environment!
and GUIs - how many frameworks do you know? and tools that do their 
best
to hide what's going on - IDEs that don't let you see or modify the 
dependency
tree?

I don't think the problems facing programmers today are, in balance, 
harder
or easier than they were when I started programming 25-30 years ago 
but they
are different.

Alan G.
Scratching his grey beard :-)