Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it.
I learned HTML in the mid nineties and even then I don't honestly recall learning very much from View Source. HTML has never been particularly easy to read even when written by the rare breed who are fanatical about "semantic" markup (in quotes because even so-called semantic markup doesn't communicate much in the way of useful semantics). HTML lacks extremely basic abstraction features needed to make code readable, like (up until very recently) any kind of templating or components system, so even if you were trying to learn from Yahoo! in 1996 you'd be faced with endless pages of Perl-generated HTML boilerplate. So I think most of us learned the old fashioned way, from books, tutorials and copious amounts of fiddling.
>Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it.
people understand the waxing and waning of the craft based on their experience. Someone can be an old greybeard now and have only done "web programming" starting at a young age·
Perhaps I'm wrong but I have seen this argument multiple times so I believe it is nonetheless a belief about the waning of the craft prevalent among some people.
There's a slight difference in abstraction level there. I've done more than my fair share of stepping through assembly in my life and learning things from even minified JS is a lot easier.
But I don't think many people learned programming by studying random real-world programs in a disassembler. It was once at least theoretically possible to do that with web programming, albeit not well and not anymore.
I learned HTML in the mid nineties and even then I don't honestly recall learning very much from View Source. HTML has never been particularly easy to read even when written by the rare breed who are fanatical about "semantic" markup (in quotes because even so-called semantic markup doesn't communicate much in the way of useful semantics). HTML lacks extremely basic abstraction features needed to make code readable, like (up until very recently) any kind of templating or components system, so even if you were trying to learn from Yahoo! in 1996 you'd be faced with endless pages of Perl-generated HTML boilerplate. So I think most of us learned the old fashioned way, from books, tutorials and copious amounts of fiddling.