Aug 18
But today, I’m not going to write about the hackers whatsoever. In the “chapter”, where Eric describes, what skills do you actually need to be considered as a hacker there’s a wonderful point about learning how to program and use of solutions that don’t make you think about what are you actually trying to achieve.
Digging deeper
Recently, I’ve found a very interesting document about hackers, their mindsets and culture, called “How to Become A Hacker”, written by Eric Steven Raymond, back in the old days and updated as the time went by. Basically, it’s a brief description of a person, who is considered to be a hacker, what he does/doesn’t and what do you need to do to make people call you a hacker.
But today, I’m not going to write about the hackers whatsoever. In the “chapter”, where Eric describes, what skills do you actually need to be considered as a hacker there’s a wonderful point about learning how to program and use of solutions that don’t make you think about what are you actually trying to achieve.
Nowadays, when everyone is trying to simplify everything, using frameworks for almost everything as he mentions further,If a language does too much for you, it may be simultaneously a good tool for production and a bad one for learning.
this is implied even more and I see the problem as a consequence of this attitude, in everyday usage of jQuery without understanding the core JavaScript, CSS3 generators and all similar tools, which help you to get the shit done. The “JavaScript/jQuery” skill is very popular these days and a lots of web developers are substituting the “/” for “==” in their minds. Well it isn’t and sadly many of those guys can barely write simple event handler for opening the anchors in the new window without jQuery support.Same principle applies on “how-to” tutorials. They are helpful - you can make things work simply by following the mentioned steps and then proceed further in your task, but that’s the point - you solve the task by basically copying the solution and as soon as it’s done you forget about the problem and move on, without actually learning something useful or understanding what you are doing and why are you doing it that way.The solution? Dig deeper. Even if you’re following some how-to tutorial, study it, ask questions (even if you’re asking yourself), do research and try to understand what are you doing. Otherwise, you’ll end up as a code monkey, which isn’t very interesting place to be.It's not only languages that have this problem; web application frameworks like RubyOnRails, CakePHP, Django may make it too easy to reach a superficial sort of understanding that will leave you without resources when you have to tackle a hard problem, or even just debug the solution to an easy one.
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webdevelopment
