Friday rant

First time for this but needs to be out there as we as a community can do better to educate novice coders who might someday be tomorrow's developers.

Novice coders (note I will be call them developers), many times will ask “what is wrong with my code”, I tell them, provide a better solution and they come back with “but that’s over my head, can you explain that in detail?” or “can you make my code work?”

Well in the first case “over my head”, I wonder why they don’t read Microsoft documentation? Then in the second case “make my code work”, well if it was decent code that would be me telling them how and if stuck come back and explain. Just yesterday I provided a solid solution but the asker refused to use it because I would not fix their code. I said, it’s going to be a while until you get someone to fix your code and I was right, going on 20 hours and generally speaking less answers are done on weekends.

How can this and similar situations be remedied?

Have them read the documentation, not likely from my experiences answering forum questions for 20 plus years.

Take an online computer science course or use Pluralsight, some will say “I just do this for fun” yet their projects are far from what someone does for fun and/or “I can’t afford that” which can run parallel with refusing to use open source or paid libraries.

All of the above can apply to just about any programming language from C#, VB.NET, JavaScript to even SQL.

How do we change this behavior? Better more thought out free lessons are needed or simply let those coders always be bad coders. The reason for letting them be bad coders is not wise but when they refuse to invest in being developers there really is no hope for them.

Now for those who will follow direction we as a community need to invest in better lessons that always include source code else it’s all academic.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VB.NET Working with Delegate and Events

Introduction From hobbyist to seasoned developers delegates are avoided or attempts are made to understand them, which in many cases is met with frustration. I see questions on various forums where code could be refactored by using delegates and when making suggestions to use delegates generally the response is something like “that is over my head, what I have works!”. Well just because code works does not mean there is room for refactoring. Search the Internet for VB.NET delegates and find out there are an abundance of post while the majority are not fully working examples and may be untested which can lead back to frustration. The first mistake some coders make is not reading Microsoft documentation on delegates or think outside the box and study C# code samples and a decent C# to Visual Basic converter as there are more code samples in C# than Visual Basic. One must understand that there are cases like with MulticastDelegate class there is syntactic difference on how to use them ...
Read more

Coders asking questions in online forums

 Something I've noticed over the years answering questions on various forums is They want someone to adjust their code which is in many cases complete off-base They want simple where simple is not always the case or that what they believe is hard in regards to me supplying a code solution that I see as simple. My solution usually will become simple only if they invest time to study the code rather than look at it and say jess that is over my head. What can be done?  There needs to be for instance a better way to direct these coders to content on the web starting with Microsoft code examples e.g. for C# for instance , Pluralsight, Microsoft TechNet. Where to place this? Perhaps on startup pages for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Coders need to have an incentive to be better and that can only happen with placing learning pages where they are easy to locate and for community leaders e.g. MVP's for instance to stop providing code that works with things like one character va...
Read more

Sometimes VB.NET coders make me wonder (or crazy)

 The following was taken from a die hard VB.NET coder. I believe C# promotes bloated, slow, inefficient, and buggy code, largely in part because people care more about the cosmetics of their code than they do its actual functionality, efficiency, and reusability. Wow, that is one broad stereotype while I've seen more VB.NET write really poor code more than I've seen C# developer and I'm a proponent for VB.NET coders but not for those who think the way as the above person. No matter what language a person works with there are both bad and good coders while from what I've seen between VB.NET and C# from non professionals VB.NET coders are those who tend to write unclean and loose code while for the most part C# coders that are not working professionally really can write sloppy code as a VB.NET coders does simply because a VB.NET coder can turn Option Strict Off or actually never turn it on. Then there is this "Minimization is heard more with coders using VB.NET then ...
Read more