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Comment by GrumpyNl | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes im flabbergasted on how the most basic html knowledge is lost on newer generations.

This is what you get if you learn everything by just googling exactly what you need for the moment. Reading proper books and RFCs are underrated these days.

Most people learned about this stuff by searching the web back in the day, instead of "reading proper books and RFCs." The reason this knowledge is lost is entirely due to modern web dev taking place within frameworks that abstract all that lower-level knowledge away.

I regularly ask people: have you read the man page? Seems a minimum effort one can do.

The man page for git has 1085 lines on my system. That's just too long with too much irrelevant information to be reasonable to expect someone to read when they just want one thing. I've never used them in all my time in the industry.

ChatGPT is a life saver for me though. I looked all over to try to find how to just see the history of a branch and got a million wrong results, but ChatGPT on GPT4 told me right away it was git log --first-parent <branch_name>.

Maybe because we collectively pretty badly handled knowledge transmission between generations.

For the pioneers the most difficult part of learning CS was to get hardware needed. This mostly determined the technological stack they would then learn.

Nowadays hardware is commodity and the main problem is to determine what the hell you should start learning first because you can't learn everything it has now became humanely impossible.

I was born somewhen in the middle. Because of my first field I wish I could have mastered python. But at that time the python2/3 war was at the highest and you couldn't find reliable documentation. Hell even python3 tutorial kept on blabbering about how python2 concept translated. What was i supposed to do? learn both?

That is why I focused on SQL because at least documentation was quite stable (special thanks to PostgreSQL documentation teams).

I can only imaging the nightmare that must endure rookies frontend dev nowadays.

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