age of Python programmers

[Andrea Griffini]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 01:07:01 -0500, Reid Nichol
<rnichol_rrc at yahoo.com> wrote:

>Perhaps it's just 
>where I went to school though or where I hang out, but it can't all be 
>coincidence.

IMO it's no coincidence. I think that *most* professional
programmers are not regular readers of usenet newsgroups
about the languages they use... not only that... IMO in
the bigger part they don't actually know what usenet
newsgroups are. And most didn't even read any book on the
languages and tools they use unless that happened when
they were still at school.

I decided that for myself I'll always cut out enough time
to keep studying. But many just go forever with what they
learned when they were forced to because of an exam.

I've personally lived totally absurd situations where
experienced programmers were just spending a lot of time
and energy (and were making a lot of mistakes) because
they never heard about make tools. I'm NOT kidding.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... ;-)
MS Word macros taking ages and requiring superservers
(yes... they were installing office purposely to
superservers so that MS word could use that RAM to be
able to load the file to convert) to do data conversions
that someone knowing perl wouldn't even save the script
for (but would just invoke perl with "-e").

This is no joke. I was consulted for help when the word
macro stopped working complaining first about being unable
to "undo" changes and then crashing ms word anyway after.


Looks like keeping studying, observing and "learning" is
considered "out" by many of my collegues.

Andrea