superotterman

This really made me reflect. I'm a third-year CS/Physics major in the US. I've had 3 programming-centered jobs, and informally taught several groups of students various CS topics. Heck, I'm even working on writing a guide to LaTeX and Mathematica. I can't begin to imagine how I would survive without Google and StackOverflow - and I know what I'm doing most of the time. All the little intricacies of weird APIs, or differences between versions of a language. I'd probably have to spend 50% more time without internet to accomplish things.

Do you have an indication of how CS topics get applied post-graduation there? As in, what a workplace based on coding looks like? I presume it's mostly for the government? After they leave the environment where you can spell out what they need to know, are there any obvious effects on productivity, efficiency (of the code) or creativity?

Really interesting AMA!

Any idea how accurate the '500 million lines of code' is for the site? It seems way over-estimated, but has some anonymous, supposedly knowledgeable source, in a New York Times article.

Sure, there are a lot of great programming (language) books out there. I use my O'Reilly "Java Swing" if I ever have to touch that part of Java because it's pretty well documented and explained. But for newer things like Python 3 or the dev version of Java 8 or libraries like gphoto, you can tinker for hours to solve your problem or go on Google and find a forum post from a few months ago and see what part of the library you missed in a few minutes (or find out it's not possible in the version you have, etc.). You still need to know the fundamentals, but special cases abound, as do the workarounds from dozens of places.

I'm on mobile right now, but I recall a StackOverflow about how to quickly search a Python list for an element and return its index in the list. The naive solution is obvious, but by using xrange and a couple other functions, there was a less-intuitive but faster way of solving the problem. As someone new to Python, it would have taken a long time to figure that out (readability issues temporarily set aside).

The community aspect of programming is astonishing to me, and something that's hard to ignore. That's what I mean about not having the internet when coding. A good book will always be hard to beat, but it seems we just don't have the books for trendy topics, which are one of the times when we need those resources.

Thanks! I had seen the infographic a few weeks ago but couldn't find it recently.