Re: Different style today
It runs slightly contrary to the rose-tinted nostalgia of some of the other posters, but many of the worst coders I've worked are those who start with increment coding and debugging and proceed to the conclusion that the correct way to figure out how libraries work is by empirical investigation. Reading documentation just takes time, right? And if nobody's going to read it, why write it in the first place?
If I were asked to come up with a related rant immediately it would be about people who think that date handling is easy, so they wrote it all themselves, and mysteriously enough their code gets the length of a day wrong twice a year. But that's okay because their 200 lines of date handling "was a quicker solution" than five lines of API calls that would require you actually to have learnt about what's already provided. If you wanted a rant tomorrow? Probably something else.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
