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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

Does studying CS at university make people as insufferably grumpy and unhelpful as you?

Come on, I've got a reasonable point here. People post on forums asking these questions which should have been answered during their educations.

If civil engineers had a forum site and someone asked "how do I calculate the load a simple beam", people would say, what the fuck are you doing in your job if you don't know that? Who is employing you and why? Where did you go to college? Who was your tutor because next time I'm at a dinner at my college I'm going to ask him how the fuck did they pass you.

Our current trend of saying college doesn't matter really starts to be a problem when professional programmers (yeah I'm assuming that the guy in the question is) are asking basic questions like this. This shows that we do need college education for programmers.

It also irritates me - this guy could have taken the time to learn all these basics, but for whatever reason he thought it didn't matter, and now he's paying for it.

Neither a college education nor continued employment in the field is a requirement to ask a stackoverflow question. In fact, I'd venture to say that a version of stackoverflow where the default answer to everything was "you should have learned this in college" would not be very useful (or used) at all. If you find the discussion beneath you, I suggest that you not participate and find a better use of your time. Others may be getting value from it and I can't for the life of me understand why you think this is a bad thing.

Python has a lot of users who are not programmers by profession, but rather mathematicians or scientists or other professions where Python is an excellent tool for getting their main job done.

So assuming that only well-educated programmers can have questions about a programming language is asinine.

My university education didn't cover coroutines either.

Loads of people didn't go to college, and program. Loads of people went to college doing something other than CS, and program. Loads of people haven't yet been to college, and intend to go and do CS, and program.

Why do you look down on all these people?

SO is not a site for software engineers, it's a site for programmers, regardless of their level of knowledge, education or age.

And by the way, I'd rather work with fellow programmers who don't know what a coroutine is than with an insufferable elitist like your posts make you out to be.

One of the false assumptions you're making here is that CS == programming. There's a difference between being a civil engineer, where you have to be able to calculate loads on beams, and being a physicist, where you try to understand why beams behave the way they do.

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