You're most likely getting downvoted because the modern lets-hot-glue-a-bunch-of-dependencies-together approach notwithstanding programming has gotten significantly more complex over the years. Can you muddle through with youtube videos and SO? Sure, if you want the career equivalent of staggering around in the dark stepping on rakes.

The idea that one needs MIT-level training with SICP and AOCP is elitist and sickening. You start by writing small and useful tools that help you explore the language features. You compare your code to other people's code solving a similar problem. You look for ways to make it shorter, more readable, more efficient by reading SO and watching YouTube.

Nobody says you do. In fact, I agree that a lot of the paths people who have never mentored a programmer their entire life think you have to take are bullshit. (Teaching is not mentoring. Mentoring is mentoring).

However, that doesn't mean that it doesn't take a lot to become a decent programmer. It does. And not just in terms of time, but perhaps most importantly in terms of intellectual maturity.

Nobody said an Ivy League educations is (or should be) a requirement to write code. That said without some form of guidance a fledgling developer has no way to discern good code from bad or grasp the architectural or security implications of some random-ass code snippet they lifted off of SO. So again, unless your plan is to spend the bulk of your career repeating other people's mistakes in an effort to learn the hard way getting some kind of formal training should be a primary goal. I'm entirely self-taught and let me tell you from experience rediscovering a design pattern from first principles years after the book was published isn't as heroic as it sounds.

Exactly. The newer teaching materials and resources are great, but they don't change the advice in the article about how to learn programming. In fact, they might make it harder in some ways because of the temptation to take shortcuts.

You're downvoted but learning material has improved a lot since then. Spaced repetition + today's resources should remove a couple years from the 10.

People can even practice programming on their phone with termux. Anyone can program anytime instead of having to wait to use the family computer for just an hour like back in the day. It's so easy to get mileage in.

The complexity of frameworks has increased, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the learning material on the fundamentals is more available and free.

This medium article[1] argues there is a decline of genius.

> I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.

But I believe we are in a golden age, innovations are made every year, life keeps getting better. Change is so frequent that it has become mundane and we don't appreciate it.

Many people are taking advantage of the quality of learning resources, and it's speeding up the development of everything.

[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...

> People can even practice programming on their phone with termux. Anyone can program anytime instead of having to wait to use the family computer for just an hour like back in the day. It's so easy to get mileage in.

It may be like that for some, but generally in the 90s computers were widely available and those interested were usually allowed by their family to use them as needed.

There were tutorials. There were digital manuals. It was not that different.

In countries like America yes those 90s computers were widely available.

But now practically everyone no matter the country has a phone now. The availability is much higher. There are more ways to learn, videos from harvard and fun games are the new introductions instead of manuals.

Sure, for a few countries (perhaps Brazil, India, China). That is not really related to technological progress but to economical development in those countries, though.

Everyone else either had that access (Europe, Australia, Japan, even Russia) or is still too poor to have time or is lacking the necessary fundamental education to be able to focus on it even now (for example, much of Africa, unfortunately).

Ironically your advice of watching YouTube videos and reading SO posts sounds more like those "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" books. There's no easy shortcuts to truly learning any topic.

I only read one of those (Teach Yourself Microsoft Access 97 in 24 Hours). It was 25+ years ago obviously. First of all it's about 24 hour-long chapters with exercises to follow. That's a good amount of material to pick up something like MS Access, and it's not like you'll learn everything within 24 hours from now, but after 24 hours of learning in a week or so.

(You might laugh at MS Access but it was useful at least 3 times in my career, but mostly in the 25-15 year ago range.)

All of what you just said is an exact modern version of the same shortcuts. Net difference is probably minimal whether you had a crap book or watched a pile of YT in short order or short cut through someone else's project, or SO.

Comprehension takes time. Thinking for yourself, making smart architectural decisions, working in an ambiguous stack, and so on.

The nature of the shortcut for experience is the same. Experience crushes anything you learned elsewhere. My best engineers are senior engineers with a fuck load of experience for a reason.

Actually, no. What you describe is a superficial culture in which people mistake instant gratification for actual knowledge and experience. That might work if you are content to end up being a lifelong junior dabbler, sitting the end of a Jira-pipeline and doing what you are being told. It is not how you become a principal or someone people call when they have problems for which there doesn't exist obvious blueprints.

Are you claiming that this techniques will substantially cut down how much time is required?

How much time it would take to achieve level that in 1998 would need 10 years?

Oh please. All of these time estimates, from 24 hours to ten years to 10,000 hours are completely bogus.

The “24 hours” figure is marketing copy designed to unify and differentiate a brand of technical manuals.

The person who coined the 10,000 hours rule (Anders Ericsson) rejects it as an oversimplification of an arbitrary number, noting that half of the violinists in his study fell short of that number. The ten years figure is derived from this flawed rule.

The linked article is well-written, but the comments are giving “kids these days” insecurity and mid-life crisis.

SO answers, SEO-driven blog posts and YouTube videos are not good learning tools. They provide shallow answers to specific questions. They don't teach you deeper lessons or give a nuanced understanding, and they don't give the experience of practice. I believe programmers have become worse over time due to depending on them.