[Courses] [python] Googling isn't cheating :-)

[Monique Y. Mudama]

On Thu, Jul  7 at 18:57, Akkana Peck penned:
> In fact, if you think of programmers as people who know everything
> and just toss off programs without thinking twice, don't!  In
> practice, a surprisingly large fraction of programming time is spent
> searching online for documentation, tips and algorithms.  Googling
> is an important part of being a programmer.  Even if you're
> completely fluent in Python (or whatever language you're using),
> there are hundreds of libraries you can use to solve problems
> without writing everything from scratch, and no one can remember how
> to use all of them.  (I'll be talking a little about importing
> libraries in lesson 4.)

I'd like to expand on this - please let me know if I'm stepping on
toes / spamming / annoying by doing so:

Someone once told me - a good programmer doesn't know everything; but
she knows where to find it.  That's gotten a lot easier, thanks to
google (but my husband and I still amass an unreasonable number of
old-fashioned paper technical books, which you can scribble on,
hilight, and bookmark.)

This was really driven home for me when I briefly had to work in an
environment with no internet access.  It felt like coding with
my brain tied behind my back.  

In fact, to me, one of the benefits of your course is that it gives me
ideas of what to google.  (eg, googling "python printing without spaces"
and "python printing without newlines" because I felt sure there must
be a way.)  That led me to read about i/o handling and allowed me to
recognize some similarities with both old-school C and with perl.

I have never wanted to be defined by a single programming language; I
want people to see me as someone who solves problems with the best tools
available.  Realistically, when you switch programming languages every
few months or so, you aren't going to be able to remember every nuance
of the language.  Well, I can't speak for you; I know I can't.  I still
think of Java as my "native" programming language, the one I know most
intimately, but I haven't written anything significant in Java in years
- when I next work in Java, I'll be googling like a fiend.

-- 
monique