this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Honestly SO fuelled the rise of the cut and paste developer. I won't be that sad to see the end of it, and the LLMs that scraped it soon after.
You are also underestimating how sites like SO really helped a new generation of programmers learn. Anyone could search and learn things, whether to take a serious approach or just for a bit of fun.
Before they pulled up the ladder. There is NOTHING more frustrating than looking up a problem, getting the exact question you are looking for, only for the answers to say the question is locked and given a link to another malformed question which tell you to rtfm, and that this is no longer supported., try to do something else with a completely different software in a completely different way. All in an attempt to keep the question pool pure. I do not mourn SO.
My favorite is being provided a solution but with absolutely no context or how the solution addresses the root cause.
I think you're underestimating how badly it taught them. I see a lot of developers (when interviewing) that are unable to reason about code.
Lot's of people learn how to cook by following recipes, but they don't try to get work in catering or running restaurants. That requires a different level of understanding.
SO was the coding recipe book. It was fine for hobbyists. Not professionals.
The amount of people I've been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say "it doesn't work", and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me...
Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It's like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don't even stop to think about the problem if something doesn't immediately work.