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Anyone can program without an internet connection. You just need the local documentation.

Local documentation does not exist anymore, in a practical form.

You need the official docs plus countless other resources from other people and for a relevant version of your software.

Gone are the days a few books and a computer was all you needed.

Your compiler is spilling out some weird message? Go scavenge the interwebs for someone who figured it out or spend your whole weekend in that.

someplace like http://devdocs.io goes real far

If you can't understand the messages from your complier or need other resources from people that you can't find in the doc, either the language/compiler you are using is crappy and you should use a real one, either you aren't a developer but a copy/paster that pretend to be one.

not practical

How do you think developers built programs pre google/stack-overflow? i.e. early to late 90's.

A shelf or two full of books and magazines and generally much more slowly.

It was hard and less people did it.

And now it's easy and we're drowning in endless webby and cloudy cruft.

The people who declared themselves developers/programmers weren't just serial copy/pasters that is for sure.

Exactly, when my car doesn't work I just ride one of my horses /s

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