As a perl geek I feel duty bound to point out that along with hubris and impatience, laziness is one of the virtues of a programmer http://www.netropolis.org/hash/perl/virtue.html . Though perhaps not in the sense you mean it!

I do agree that the easy availabiltiy of cut & paste lumps of code on the Internet, along with RAD tools has changed the way that many people code. And I think its a shame for those people who don't dig a little deeper and actually understand what they're writing. I find unpicking code absolutely fascinating. OTOH I'm pretty sure there are others out there who will learn to do this. And the tools available make this loads easier than when I was learning BASIC on my ZX81 back in the day -- from forums to decent books, tutorials, irc and so on. So I do hold out some hope that people will learn to program, maybe just fewer than "when I were a lad".

Cheers
Charlie


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Charlie Harvey's website - linux, perl, java, anarchism and punk rock: http://charlieharvey.org.uk