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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there anything stopping you? The closest thing I've ever had to a CS class was the "Matlab and Fortran for Dummies" they made all the engineering students take, but by that time I'd taught myself BASIC (which was easy; unteaching myself the bad habits it engendered was harder...) and C from books, plus Perl and C++ from websites. And that was back in the Bad Old Days, when BASIC still had an excuse for existing as an "intro language", even if it was unsuitable for large applications. Today if you ask "what's the best way for someone with zero experience to get started" the answer is "Python" and if you ask "what's this bleeding-edge research code being written in" the answer is often "Python", so the onramp has never been more gentle.

You still want a CS degree on the team for some types of work (I was able to help my niece with her homework, right up until she got to graph algorithms...), but most of my co-workers are engineering or math or both; lots of places need someone who thoroughly understands the application domain and can code a little more than they need someone who thoroughly understands programming and doesn't know what they're writing it for.