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Discussion on: On Being a Hopelessly Insecure Programmer

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yucer profile image
yucer • Edited

Hi.

Some time ago I was having a conversation with a friend, a physician. He was complaining that he should always keep studying because its job was extremely complex and the medical equipment, techniques and available medicaments were advancing very quickly.

I did reply:

Well.. at least your hardware doesn't change so oft. It is true that the knowledge in your branch is advancing quickly, but the human body remains the same and it is not common that you need to discard what you have learn five years ago about diseases.

That, my friend, happens continuously to us.

I have been programming for more that 30 years now (since I was 10 years old) and I have faced many times the reality of knowledge obsolescence.

I remember of using BASIC, QUICKBASIC, Turbo PASCAL, Delphi, ASP, ... and many other technologies or computer languages that are not used too much nowadays. What you are learning today would be obsolete in some years...

But if you focus on the theory, the probability of obsolescence diminish.

I know that the industry is trying to diminish the university, by mean of online learning and certifications. But if you want such knowledge that never expires, you might need also to go to university or at least buy some classical theory books (Database theory, programming paradigms, Operating Systems, etc..).

One good source is MIT's Opencourseware.

But .. hey.. You might not need that. It depends on which are your expectations, and what is your plan of life.

If you want programming skills to apply in a problem domain then it is just a matter of look information about that.

We need all to realize that there is no such concept like a universal programmer that knows all the industry branches in detail. At most we might have a general overview of everything, and now what is every topic is about, but not to take full domain of everything.

It is already very difficult to be a full-stack programmer, almost impossible to deeply know all the stacks.

If you achieve to learn everything about informatics and computer sciences, then you would realize you became old, probably applied nothing, and lost the time of enjoying the life.

So don't put your expectations to high, try to learn by doing what you need and from time to time read something about the theory. You will soon find that what make programmers more valuable is not so much they knowledge about informatics, it is more about the knowledge they acquire over the problem domains (the branch for what the software is going to be used to...)

Also take a time to read what is one of these programming paradigms about. Not deeply, just to read the descriptions.

Try to read the tech news and, if some concept is new for you, just try to read the basic definitions.

Good luck, relax and enjoy learning !