There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your own, and the sense of accomplishment/retention that it instills. I started programming a few years after you and there was a similarly difficult learning curve in sourcing the materials, setting up my own environment, and making progress on your own.
My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity.
Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?
>There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your own
Depends on what the difficulty is. I remember when I started to learn programming back in 1991, I was learning from books. These books were very expensive and I could only afford a few of them. I didn't have access to a library because I wasn't in any school or university. I was a musician with a side job at a theatre box office.
My main problem was that many of the explanations and examples in my programming books left some questions unanswered. It was even worse with maths, which I also tried to learn at the time. I got stuck a lot. If I'd had access to something like stackoverflow or Google, I could have progressed much much faster.
I do think that getting stuck and being forced to figure something out the hard way is sometimes useful. But more often than not I didn't get stuck because the material was actually difficult or because I was solving difficult problems. I got stuck because the one and only explanation available to me was imprecise or incomplete. All I needed was the same thing explained with slightly different words to clear up my misunderstandings.
On the whole I think learning these things today is immeasurably more productive. People are a lot less dependent on luck or money. You don't need to be one of the lucky few who has access to good teachers. You don't have to buy expensive books. Everyone has access to excellent online tutorials, documentation, source code and to thousands of competent professionals willing to help for free. It's absolute heaven. Back then it was hell.
You could have made that same argument about memory and recall skills prior to search engines. But I'm not sure anyone is now arguing search engines have been detrimental to working intelligence.
I pretty much skated through college on my ability to remember trivial facts because this is what the classes I took graded on.
Does anyone care that the head of the art history department did his phd on Picasso, taught two full semester courses on him and I know more about Picasso’s life than probably 99.9% of the general population?
Doubtful…
But I do know things that never made it into the search engines (I’ve looked) and this knowledge is locked up in a (probably) retired professor and the few percent of students who actually listened to his lectures twenty-something years ago.
Now everyone assumes that if it isn’t in google it doesn’t exist and have very little idea how to find information outside of what’s contained in its “record of all things”.
My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity.
Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?