I don’t know
I’ve been programming for the past fifteen years. I still feel like I don’t know shit. Maybe that’s why I love it, it’s feels endless, every time I learn something it’s like opening a door to a new room that has another five doors in it. I guess it’s true about a lot of things, and that some people can find this infinite quest discouraging, but I feel it’s the fuel that keeps me motivated every morning going to work.
I feel lot a lot of topics I’ve studied in undergrad school (some 10+ years ago) were really important but I don’t remember them anymore. Hell, Scheme was the first language we studied and the only thing I can remember is lots of parenthesis. Yet when I started programming in JavaScript I found out uses lambda and closures and all these funky concepts I remembered I have forgotten. Now I’m reading about compilers and the JVM and Abstract syntax tree and AWK and SED which I sense are partially buried in some unreachable corners of my brain. I guess I feel today, with all the libraries and tools, fancy IDEs, new languages, new frameworks, etc, I (and maybe you too) spend most of my time learning how to configure stuff, but spending much less time thinking about the foundations, how things are built, how to use them to create your own little tools, how to connect these concepts to your work. There is this annoying argument that everyone says: “don’t reinvent the wheel”, don’t spend time writing tools, spend time focusing on your business model and application. Yet I believe the truth of the matter is you spend very little time focusing on your business model and most of the time searching for pre-made, figured out tools you “just” have to configure. I feel like these tools are microwave dinners, but I really love cooking not reading the package instructions and preparing dinner in 5 minutes. Maybe it’s a bad analogy, but I can’t find a better one.
Hell, I’m not saying write your own language like Fog Creek people did, I’m just saying let’s all spend a little more time programming, understanding the fundamentals and try connecting them to the tools we use, and problems we have to solve, and less time writing posts in forums of some popular framework we “must” use.
