Hacker News Reader

Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I hang out a bit in #javascript on freenode and it's always surprising how many people come in with a "guesswork" attitude to programming.

They just think up how they expect something should work, or what they think something should be called, and try it. Then come in and ask why it's not working. They often exchange misinformation with each other without either party realizing it's false.

Then if you suggest to them they read up on the API for what they're trying to do, they won't... they'll just keep trying random things, trying to get someone to feed them the answer.

I think javascript is particularly bad for this, even though there are some really good books and references out there now.

View on HN

Is this the usual way of figuring something out in other contexts? It sounds like the "trying to get my WiFi to work" crowd is doing Javascript. Those folks wouldn't know what to do with a language spec, nor have ever entertained the concept of a universe that works like that. ("You mean there's something that explains precisely what everything in Javascript does?")

I think that a lot of people from other walks of life somehow end up working on HTML projects learn that in order to make their mouseover menus work they need something called JavaScript, so they search for cut and paste something that someone says is what they want and then start hunting for someone to get them over the hump to make it work.

This is not meant to disparage people like web designers who come at things from an artistic angle, but a lot of people who write Javascript are doing it in a tertiary role -- in support of HTML in support of producing a visual design that they envision. That these people don't have a solid foundation in programming shouldn't be alarming or disconcerting.

Ten years ago Javascript had a reputation of being a crap/toy language, largely for this reason. It really wasn't until GMail, IMO, when people started saying "Look, a JS app that doesn't suck!" and things kind of went forward from there.

I think that you might be confusing the attitude with the usual crowd. I personally apply the "guesswork" attitude whenever learning anything programming related - snipe a few packages which look right from the Ubuntu repositories, play around in the REPL, write a few toy programs. Then maybe after a few days, go read a few tutorials online and sometime later browse through the manual, but that is only later, after the initial 'guesswork'.

Either you're talking about something different, or I don't understand what's wrong with such an approach... Although maybe 'experimental' is a better title?

...correction: On rereading your post a few more times, I realize it's just a misconception of terminology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com