Post programming questions online and you’ll inevitably get someone saying, “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Why is it so bad to step outside the box?
A few years back, one of my old high school teachers told me that none of his students asked him any questions during an AP math class. That they all just sat there like robots.
And when you question systems of authority and power structures, people always bring up, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. I literally just got called a Nazi for thinking it odd that Lemmy moderators should be able to limit your interactions from other Lemmy instances.
By keeping them indoors all the time, have we raised a generation of kids who question nothing? This isn’t normal, people. You’re supposed to question things, especially those with power over you. Humans are self-serving. That means your moderators, betters, and superiors will always serve their own interests over yours.
This is totally different… That’s not deference to authority or conformity, that’s fundamental best practices
If you want to do more than play with code puzzles, the first question you should ask is “how have others solved this problem”. And the second should be “how have others approached similar problems”
Code is castles upon castles built of sand… Even the language you use and the rock that runs it are entirely manmade. Coding is a fundamentally collaborative process, and if you want to innovate you need to understand how and why things were done the way they are first.
Otherwise you’re going to write really shit code, even if you’re the cleverest coder to ever live, the code will be shit because it’ll be a huge pain in the ass to work with for everyone else. And probably for yourself too, once your realize why things are done a certain way and understand that it’s usually there’s been a ton of thought and discussion that led it to being the way things are done
If you’re asking questions without comparing the proposed benefits of your new solution to the normal approach, you’re not yet prepared to enter the discussion on how things should be done
So of course the correct response should always be to remind you that you should first learn how others did it. That never goes away, it’s something we remind each other constantly even at the deeper levels of understanding
It’s good life advice too. Humans aren’t nearly as creative as we like to think, as a species we hardly ever have truly new ideas. The way our creative process works is by rearranging the concepts we already know in new ways. If you want to be an innovator, you should be constantly finding wisdom in others and the world around you
As for the deference to authority? That’s because we live in uncertain times and people are scared. It’s more comforting to think someone knows what they’re doing instead of acknowledging the truth… We have very big problems that we are not confronting as a species in any meaningful way.
That tendency as a species is one of those very big problems in fact