blowdart wrote:
 And having google doesn't produce them. It's not elitist at all; freely available information doesn't help when people do not think or evaluate if the first 3 hits on google are in fact any good or applicable to their situation. I'd disagree we need lots of good programmers; we need more good programmers, and code monkeys that take advice. The outsourcing projects I've worked with have all failed because advice was never taken. Heck I've seen bad code justifed by pointing to someone's blog articles (not mine obviously, my code articles are stunning *grin*)

Patterns illustrate this really well, I've seen too many people go pattern happy, pushing their code into patterns because they don't *think*, they just do as they believe they're told.

Turning google off would be wonderful; but it isn't going to happen. It's a shame the solution is to teach people to think; that doesn't seen to happen any more either.
Freely available information being used improperly is just a wrong-headed excuse to want to turn it off. It's a rather insidious form of censorship if you think about it.

You disagree that we need lots of good programmers, and then in the same breath you say that we need more good programmers. Umm, so do you actually disagree, or are you just being disagreeable, because I disagree with you?

I agree that it would be better if people thought more. I think it would be more pragmatic to eliminate the necessity of thought on tasks that are really simple enough not to require much of it. Make it as simple as possible but not too simple.

We need better software development tools so that we can focus our thoughts on the actual problems and not the plumbing. We need more prescriptive software development guidance. We need a better way to share code than copy-pasting source from Google, one that is peer-reviewed (hence my digg reference).

Look, man, you can't just tell people not to do something and then not offer a better alternative. People will just ignore you and continue doing what barely gets them by.

Anyways, I'll stop being a "code democratization zealot" in this thread.