Stack Overflow releases a quarterly archive[0] of all their data which is only a few gigabytes.

If I had access to a couple Computer Science books, all the documentation for my languages and the entirety of Stack Overflow at my fingertips? I think I could do just fine.

If I wanted to take it a step further, I could download common libraries that I thought would be useful. I've been learning Rust lately, and I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of all 2000 libraries in Cargo and it still wouldn't be that big.

I'm one of those people who do their best work when put under serious constraints. I think 520 days devoted to programming and study with no access to the outside internet would be a neat opportunity.

[0] - https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

  > I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of 
  > all 2000 libraries in Cargo

Funnily enough, the Rust developers have actually already written that script, and they run it weekly in order to determine that there have been no stability regressions in the nightly version of the compiler. :)

Thanks for posting this, I wasn't aware of th SO/SE archives. I really like having backups/archives of important/valuable data, this is super cool!

I guess this is how those black hat hackers spend their time after they get arrested.

It's not really; it's about the same difficulty that it ever was. We've just become very lazy (i.e efficient) when it comes to solving our own problems. Over the course of 520 days, you might be amazed at what you could figure out on your own if you had no other choice.

Man pages. And one or two references on each main piece of your stack. If you can't program given that, you are not a programmer.

Why do you narrow your view of programmers so much in that one statement? Just because someone doesn't fit your definition doesn't make it true. Innovation is built on the foundation of other people's work. Man pages are not source for all human knowledge. People like you irk me to no ends.

> People like you irk me to no ends.

That was unnecessary.

I don't know where the line is drawn between 'programmer' and 'cut n paster'; but ams6110 has a point that once you have enough foundational information on a particular stack then anyone calling themselves a programmer should be able to run from there. If you can't problem solve once you have the core information then I'd say ams6110's statement is accurate. Especially if everything you're working with is open source.

    man svn
    [...]
    For more information about the Subversion project, visit http://subversion.tigris.org.

Of course you would use a DVCS in space, but still.