Spolsky: Modern developers learn by page faulting knowledge, not reading manuals
Joel Spolsky · a16z Podcast | The Future of Software Development · Jan 2, 2019 · at 13:00
Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow, explains how developer education has shifted from studying comprehensive documentation to searching for targeted solutions on-demand while programming.
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“We think is that people have given up from learning a priori how to use the programming environments that they're working in. They don't even read a book, let alone the documentation. I think they start by writing code or by cutting and pasting code. They don't even go to the books. The, they start by we think of it as sort of page faulting in knowledge. So you actually type as you code, you have problems. You type your problem, whatever problem you hit, you type into Google and you get a result hopefully from Stack Overflow if we've done our job. And you cut and paste that into your source code, and then you continue. So you're essentially learning literally only the exact thing that you need in any given time to make a step forward.”
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