Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
In that case, your experience is different to mine.
I've seen a lot of code, especially with self-taught web developers, that I was able to crash within minutes. Sometimes that could be done just by requesting a file called "FILE" instead of "file". File not found, big fat PHP error.
"Shit. I didn't know Linux/Unix was case sensitive." (Development on Windows does not catch these errors, and then your software falls apart when uploaded to a Linux/Unix webhost.)
Hey, the site puts parameters in the URL. Seems to work... but what happens when I change "?param=0" to "param=-1"? Crash. Cool, I can now see a huge amount of parameter info about the site. Look at that. "?login=0". Can I login by making it "?login=1" by hand, even without providing a username or password? Yes!
"Oops..."
Believe it or not, but these simple things often get overlooked by self-taught programmers/software engineers, especially when just starting out. While stuff like this is self-evident for people who know it, this is not the case for everyone. In your education, you get taught stuff like that.
Not true. Some of those systems are so extremely interconnected and interdependent due to bad design that changing something in one module will break another module.
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I've seen a lot of programmers trip up on the same stuff, even though they have a degree. All degree programs are not created equal with it comes to programming. Most academic programmers tend to be rather naive when it comes to the exception handling situations that you describe, since exception handling tends to be ignored in academic settings in the interest of simplifying the examples. Exception handling tends to come for having a few years of experience where it actually matters if your code blows up.
Most of the programmers that I know, don't have computer degrees, but rather degrees in other majors. Several of my college roomates went on to careers as programmers with degrees in Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Management. Where a computer degree comes in handy is that it gives you the framework to shift technologies more easily.