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Yeah, and you could get a really big one for a nickel, too. But perhaps I should stay on point.
About eight years ago, it was my duty to assist a young graduate student, who had an "intern" position with my employer, in getting to work and back each day. One day while we were in transit, this intern, whom we shall call Miss Smith, stunned me by saying with no trace of embarrassment that she never could understand the difference between disk storage and RAM, or why it was important.
Yes, you read that right. I'll wait while you unswallow your tongues.
Mind you, Miss Smith was quite intelligent, on the verge of receiving a Master's degree in Computer Science. She was near to completing a major, much needed transformation of our employer's extensive documentation database. But her education in Computer Science had exposed her only to interpretive tools such as Visual Basic, Access, and Excel. She had never had to run a compiler or linkage editor. She had never had to debug a program interactively. She didn't know what "assembly language" is. In short, she had never had to grapple with the physical reality underneath the virtual world maintained by her interpretive tools.
Yet Miss Smith's skills with those tools were considerable and quite valuable. I have no doubt that she received her Master's degree, and went on to become someone's well-paid employee, on the strength of what she knew.
At the time of the conversation mentioned above, I went into a great, gesture-filled, loathsomely detailed presentation on the differences between RAM and offline storage, why each was necessary and neither was sufficient, and what the divergence between the two could mean according to circumstances. It took the whole of an hour's ride, and I wasn't nearly finished when Miss Smith wished me a good evening, stepped gracefully out of my car, and fled screaming in terror for her dorm room. To this day, I can't be sure that she grasped any fraction of what I said...or, in all candor, whether it would have mattered if she hadn't.
It was possible for Miss Smith to get by without the knowledge under discussion because the tools with which she worked made it unnecessary. Whether it will ever become necessary is questionable; indeed, it becomes less and less likely as time passes and developers' tools increase further in power.
Now, what was that about linked lists?
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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The young lady was far ahead of you 
Look at the details of virtual memory and paging. With a little imagination you can see that we actually could do without a traditional file system by placing everything into one huge virtual memory space. Data would be swapped between the disk and the memory as needed automatically. It would be different to what we are used to, but we would never have to deal with file systems again.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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(chuckle) Far enough, I suppose. Still, there's something chilling about a "Computer Science" major unaware of the functions of the computer's various components:
- She'd never heard of the CPU registers;
- She'd never been introduced to the concept of virtual memory;
- She had no idea that her whole development world was virtual;
- "Communications protocol? What's that?"
- "You mean there's more than one?"
Among the classical-era Greeks, physicians proposed a model of the human body as "a bag of blood," with organs floating in it here and there. Miss Smith's model of the computer was comparable...except that the organs were something of a mystery to her. She probably wished they'd "go away"...at least, after she'd escaped my tutelage.
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Our intern's favorite word used to be 'nowadays', especially when telling me about those oldschool thinges we 'nowadays' don't have to waste any thought about anymore. He already has begun to change his tune since he started writing some code for a 'weak' 1 GHz dual core ARM processor, but the young Padawan still has a lot to learn
Seriously, this is the stuff they are taught and they don't have any choice but to believe it. I remember well how the Professor started with 'Nowadays (!) the compilers are better than the average assembly programmer' when I still sat at the school bench. He thought I was a bit arrogant when I told him that I usually don't aim for the average. He did not know that I had about 12 years experience in assembly programming at that time. Anyway, I can see how you can get a degree in computer science by specializing on the more abstract stuff.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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I started basically with these tools that her used. But i walked down because of curiosity. I wanted more and always knowed that these tools hiddened things from me, and wanted to know what they are. In reality, i wanted to make my own visual basic. Six years latter i am finishing my graduation. Now i can make my own compiler if i need, i use garbage collectors, but i understand the problems that can arise, like cache invalidation and memory fragmentation.
The conclusion is that these tools are valuable and produce healthy to enterprises and people, even by hiding the internals, or because of it. I dont know how my cars works, but this is not a problem if someone else has the knowledge.
There will always be these that like the innerworkings of the things and will go futher down. They can be scarse and the projection is to only increase, but they will exist. Good for who have the knowledge.
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Perhaps this a case of "preservation bias"?
Today any reasonably smart person with an "average" problem can find answers by themselves (by searching web forums, online books, Wikipedia, etc). Therefore there's a world of questions that get answered without ever being registered (e.g. by being posted to a forum).
With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
The state of mankind being what it is, it's not hard to figure that type 2 questions will come up much more often than type 1.
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The problem with type 1 is that those questions usually involve a specific scenario which most potential repliers have never encountered. The best you can hope for then is that somebody actually gives the question some real thought and comes up with something.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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Sure, but if all we ever got were questions of the type "wow, I've never thought of that, let me hack on it a bit", then Eric would be a lot less exasperated about what he sees on the forums.
My point is, the reason we see so many dumb-ass questions these days (my hypothesis goes) is not because people in general have become dumber, but because reasonably smart people get answers to their reasonably difficult questions by looking them up on the web, so we're left with the lazy-asses who couldn't even bother to Google the damn thing, plus the occasional bright mind with an actually novel question.
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And I don't think that you are far from the truth with it. I guess that there will always be those who think that the grey mass in their heads is only there to keep the ears apart.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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Definitely.
1) Find it on Google (with multiple well-worded searches)
2) Ask someone on a programming chatroom.
3) Then move to a forum.
That's my standard anywho. So far all I've needed to stick for public reading over the internet is a request for a bitstack writing/reading formula on cplusplus.com. I'm forever helping people on the chatrooms, generally unstructured questions are easier to receive there.
The only problem is there's no way to optimise your code without someone more experienced looking at it. I've replaced fwrite() with fputs() and malloc() with calloc() thanks to chatroom coders. If you're a regular who helps others, the veterans are happy to help you.
PS: My bitstack question probably was the only Type 1 I've encountered. See it here. I did do a lot of research.
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Agreed. Though with regards to Type 2 - if they're intelligent enough to find a forum, signup for an account, verify the account, and post a question, one would think they'd know how to use Google!
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Perhaps we should raise the bar for forum subscription then?
How about adding a little questionnaire? I vote for questions on pointer arithmetic and template metaprogramming. 
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Great idea... though I'd be concerned if I'd still be allowed on the forums  Maybe something as simple as the "skill testing" questions that you see on various contents would be enough to weed out the most ridiculous forum questions... what is (6+3)x(10/2)?
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xperroni wrote: With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up
from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from
very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find
any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't
bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
That however is a matter of perception.
I suspect there are a number of mathematicians that would find any number of problems "trivial", yet which even the most enthusiastic beginning hobbyist would find very difficult.
As an example in programming I now find it trivially easy to understand recursion and even to unroll a recursive methods. But I also remember that when I was first introduced to recursion it took me 18 months to finally understand it.
Further your simplistic scenario ignored the simple statistical fact...people that post here, by definition, must be those that even if they did do research did not find or did not understand the answers they did find. Thus there could be tens or hundreds times the number of people who are successfully learning by themselves.
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jschell wrote:
xperroni wrote: 2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.
That however is a matter of perception.
Then let's define a "trivial problem" as "so thoroughly documented, anyone able to articulate the question is also able to find an answer they can understand". I believe this to be fairly close to the spirit of the original complaint. My point also remains the same: smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will pester the forums instead.
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xperroni wrote: smart people will look answers up and we won't hear from them, dumb people will
pester the forums instead.
Simplistic and wrong.
The fact that an individual does not understand something doesn't make them stupid.
The fact that someone isn't as smart as everyone else doesn't automatically preclude them from programming either.
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jschell wrote: The fact that an individual does not understand something doesn't make them stupid.
The fact that they rush to post a question to the forums without so much as Googling it first, however, does.
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When speaking internally I find it's a matter of balance. If there's a team member who has an unresolved issue there is some benefit in them researching on their own to get a solution. However, this takes time and can impact the project timeline and budget. At some point you want them to speak up and say "hey, I could use some help". On the other hand, if they don't learn to research and solve their own problems they'll never become a decent dev. I don't think there's a simple answer to this - if anyone has one I'd be interested to hear.
On the topic of stupid questions on forums, especially those marked as urgent, I tend to agree with more of the replies I've seen here... people have become lazy and want others to do the work for them. The number of simple questions that I've seen that should be known by anyone that has taken CompSci 101, read an intro book to programming, or is capable of being answered through the most basic of Google searches, deserves to be flamed and ridiculed. My personal favorites are the ones where someone replies with an answer and the original poster asks for more clarification and sample code because they don't understand (ie. will you do my homework for me?). At that point I'm thinking "you've been given the answer - take the time to understand it on your own time or hire someone to do it for you, but don't expect someone to do YOUR work for free". Maybe I'm being cynical? "There's no such thing as stupid questions... only stupid people."
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G-Tek wrote: "There's no such thing as stupid questions... only stupid people."
I've seen both.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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And they usually come in pairs
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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You could have Googled your question.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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So, please, stop using that GPS device and buy the relevant (paper) maps. 
Veni, vidi, vici.
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No, you didn't get it.
Using GPS is fine. You go about your way without bothering anyone. Stopping at every street corner to ask for directions, annoying pedestrians and blocking the way for other drivers, that's lame.
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Using the latest help technology provides is sensible. That's my point.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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Yes, that's what we've been saying all along.
Only that in this case, "the latest help technology provides" is web searching.
The problem we have is precisely the people that won't use "the latest help technology provides", and will instead hit the forums with the same basic questions, over and over.
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