Yes we were all fledgling programmers at one point in our lives. One thing that's good to learn from the beginning is not to rely on people holding your hand to find solutions. If you don't learn to find solutions for yourself then you might as well turn on a different profession. Everyone wants to get into computers nowadays, its been like that for some time.

What happens when they don't learn how to figure things out for themselves? You get the various C# programmers (not all C# programmers are bad, just the ones we tend to see) that would rather "design" programs rather than "code" them. Most have no idea the inner workings of the system and say its useless to know it. They look for a function to do everything for them. If not given every expensive tool in the book and every bloated library under the sun, they can't make even the simplest of programs.

No programmers should know the inner workings of their system and should have the code ethics to be able to keep up and surpass any GUI based programming system. That way when problems come up or you don't have all the tools needed to perform a task, you are able to complete it with what you have.

Sure you can help him with his basic homework, but are you really helping? Or are you just helping dumbing down Programming and IT further one tiny step at a time? :P

Sorry that's my little rant ^.^
-Jessica-

I agree totally, Jessica. I'm 'old-school' too, and while some of the tools are handy, you shouldn't DEPEND totally on them, but rather on your skills and knowledge. Like 'web-programmers', who can't do anything without Frontpage or Coldfusion.

Had one tell me once that you couldn't do LDAP authentication for web pages...because the Coldfusion 'module' at that time, wouldn't work properly in our environment. A very simple PHP page did in half an hour, what this 'programmer' couldn't do in a month, because he didn't know how to code it himself. The really annoying part, was that he couldn't be bothered to learn, and it never dawned on him that just MAYBE, he could do it a different way.

only if the moderators are the speed of light

I'm even less likely to help someone who insists on using leet/aol-speek.