this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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[–] dan@upvote.au 61 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think coding offline, without reference material, is mostly a lost art.

That's how I learnt when I started - I didn't have internet access (wasn't very widespread in Australia yet) and didn't have any books. Had to learn everything through trial and error plus any sample code that came bundled with the IDE.

I think these days, there's more abstractions and a much larger reliance on third party packages that don't come bundled with documentation. This is especially the case with languages like JavaScript, where the standard library is missing so much stuff that practically any app larger than "hello world" pulls in a bunch of third party libraries.

It's still possible to write apps without any third party libraries (like in C# which has a fantastic standard library, .NET), but offline documentation (like the old MSDN CDs) has mostly gone away too.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been programming in Go for over a decade now, and unless I need to add a new dependency - which is almost never, and nearly always at the start of a project - I don't have to go online for anything. All of the docs - including for the dependencies - are there locally. The only place it hurts is if I'm being lazy and wanting to look online for example code to steal, rather than figure it out myself. That's pretty rare though.

There is an area that requires internet, though, and that's usually around specifications. I've been fighting with dbus and mpris lately, and have been spending more time with the browser than the editor. I'm not sure whether I'd be able to make any progress without examples; I'm developing a love/hate relationship with dbus - it's so absurdly convoluted and seems unnecessarily complex. Only the fact that it hasn't been replaced by something better keeps me believing all of the byzantine metadata crap is somehow necessary. Fucking CORBA isn't this obtuse.

Anyway, maybe she's having to do something with dbus, or trying to understand a Rust compiler error message. Then I can see why she might be blocked by having the internet down.

[–] Venator@lemmy.nz 0 points 1 week ago

Plz go (j/k) 😜