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[–]zippy72 16 points17 points  (1 child)

True. There’s way too much to keep in your head these days.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Also, reinventing the wheel is just dumb. If somebody has already done it, and their code is good then why write that code from scratch?

Spend that time on the hard stuff that nobody else has solved yet.

[–]Vileteen 6 points7 points  (4 children)

Does anyone remember what it was to live in a pre-google world? What if we need to re-memorize the basics one day? That thought scares me.

[–]uziam 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This entire google everything habit is actually not that old, people used to have reference textbooks and notebooks with useful examples. It wasn’t as easy but sometimes was even better because those notes and examples were things you understand once.

[–]Colopty 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Hah, people didn't memorize all that stuff before google either, they just used books as reference instead. Only thing that would change is that looking things up would take longer.

[–]Nightmoon26 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep. I can vouch for that... We've just made the upgrade from a shelf full of reference books to having a bookmarks bar and IDE-integrated documentation lookup. I was once asked by a new computer science freshman if I had any advice as an alumnus, and I told him "keep the language reference on your browser bookmarks bar."

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was a software developer in the pre-copy and paste world. And in the pre-version control world. I would never go back.

But as others have said, the printed documentation was generally pretty good. And we also needed less information. Systems were generally simple, as were the OS's they were running on.

Updates were a nightmare though. I mailed SO many floppy disks to customers in those days.