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Comment by amflare | Hacker News Reader

Pass. This article could have been published as "Why Internet Message Boards Are Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 30 years ago, "Why Google Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 20 years ago or "Why StackOverflow Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 10 years ago. Its the same-old-same-old. Has it been true in the past? Maybe, if your criteria for "good programmer" is "someone who went through the same struggle I did". But the industry grows and adapts. The next generation of programmers is going to be good at different things than we are. As long as they can get the same job done, who are we to say that they are wrong?

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Agreed.

If you're getting paid to ship features, no one cares whether you're learning, or learning the "correct" way. You simply have to get the job done. If tools like copilot help you meet your goals and budget, then they are a good thing.

I heard the same thing in the 90s when Java (and even C++) came on the scene. The C programmers bristled at the idea that you no longer had to deal with memory management. They thought it would make the programmers sloppy, generating poorly performing code bases.

They were right, and it didn't matter.

> The C programmers bristled at the idea that you no longer had to deal with memory management

The funny thing is that is the same example I was thinking of.

A generation later, most C programmers are bad at performance anyway. And they get segfaults.

You’re right on with the parallel with stack overflow, google, and message boards. I take a different conclusion though, which is that lazy irresponsible copy pasting has always been with us, but that doesn’t make it good. Remember the “full StackOverflow engineer?” Competence and diligence will continue to produce different results than faking it.

I was going to ask something along the same lines. Is the article analogous to saying python is making programmers less familiar with the underlying hardware. Perhaps something’s we don’t want to think about (boilerplate) and other things that really drive performance or business

The worse programmers are winning!

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