I expect it's a mixture, and that it's always been a mixture. I hope those who do just copy and paste right now eventually see that it's only a short-term benefit compared with the longer-term benefit of learning how things work. (Having said that, sometimes, if it's just "what command line argument do I need to do X" copy/paste is very effective, I've found.)

I don't think the availability of Stack Overflow has made things significantly worse here - people who are focused on "just get the job done" have always been able to find shortcuts without investing the time in learning more, I suspect. It's also important not to demonize people with that approach; we may think they're not doing themselves any favours, but it doesn't mean they're evil or should be treated badly. This is a failing in myself - I suspect I've been too harsh with those who don't appear to want to learn, in the past. I hope to improve in the future.

I've recorded various Pluralsight videos, and some of my conference talks are online too. I think it's important that there are lots of different media available for teaching, because people learn in different ways.

Personally I find reading (whether online or - less often these days - in book form) more useful than videos for most things, but I know it varies.

I do think there's a lot of benefit in a structured approach to learning when you're a relative beginner in a topic, instead of learning piecemeal. I'd expect a good online course to do that in the same way that a book does, but there's less benefit in watching lots of different, uncoordinated videos, each on one different language feature, for example... each video may assume a different amount of knowledge beforehand, use different metaphors etc. With a structured, ordered approach you can build from one topic onto another.

I suspect that the only point at which I'll take down Noda Time is when Microsoft has embraced/reimplemented it and it's in the framework. I'd be absolutely fine with that.

Until then, I at least need to keep producing updates when there are new versions of time zone data.

Realistically, there haven't been many changes in the codebase since 2.0. I want to release a 3.0 which removes binary serialization and embraces Span<T> at some point (it may well only target netstandard2.0) but there aren't many extra features I really want to add. There's range-related stuff we might be able to do, and maybe there are some extra calendars we could add, but I'm pretty satisfied with the bulk of it.

(There's a lot of work that could improve the docs and web site, but that's somewhat separate.)

One that someone else has implemented :) I don't doubt the value of learning underlying algorithms, but I don't pay very much attention to them these days, until I need to. In order to choose an algorithm here, I'd need to know:

• How important it is to make the right choice. (If it's only going to run once, without tight constraints, I don't really care.)
• Memory constraints
• Processor constraints
• Bounds of the problem - are these all 32-bit integers? 64-bit? 16-bit? Unbounded? The most efficient sort may well depend on those
• Whether I'm choosing an algorithm with an implementation, or whether I'm going to have to implement it. In many cases I'd trade peak performance for not having to do it myself (with the likelihood that I'd end up with bugs for at least a while)

I'm currently writing the 4th edition, and I'm nearly at the end of writing about C# 2... which I've done from scratch, mostly. I'm condensing C# 2, 3 and 4 into one chapter per version, which means cutting out a lot of the detail, unfortunately. (Fortunately the 4th edition comes with an ebook of the 3rd edition, so you can look there for more details.)

As an example of this, I've barely mentioned anonymous methods - I'll go into all the detail of captured variables etc when I cover lambda expressions, because that's what I expect the vast majority of C# developers to use these days.

I suspect the book that would improve the software engineering world most if all software engineers read it and really took it in would be "Everyday Sexism" by Laura Bates. Understanding how shockingly sexist the world is in all kinds of different ways, and then thinking how that applies within the software industry, might help us to overcome it - both in terms of our own industry diversity, and building products which better serve all users. (There are plenty of other great feminist books of course; that's just one that I know is pretty accessible and has the kind of data/evidence that I suspect a lot of existing software engineers may find compelling.)

That's a serious answer, but if you really pressed me for a programming book, I'm not sure what I'd recommend, other than C# in Depth of course. I have shelves and shelves of programming books, and I rarely use them. I do think books are a great way of learning a language or framework, mostly because they're structured knowledge, designed for the task - all the information is usually out there already, but you don't know the order in which to read it. Books provide that ordering, as well as a consistent narrative and approach - hopefully, anyway.

I'm struggling just to keep up with C# well enough to write about it in C# in Depth.

I do think .NET Core is awesome, and I'm enjoying seeing it go from strength to strength.

I think cloud computing in general is starting to reach a new level of maturity which is very welcome, too.

Ooh, RX. I haven't really used it much for quite a long time. When I did, I found it really, really interesting - but not terribly easy to use in reality. I just got confused a lot of the time. I still loved the ideas, but didn't quite see how to put them into practice.

Now it looks like a lot of people are very successful with RX in its various forms, and I definitely don't want to dissuade them. I don't even want to dissuade anyone who isn't currently using RX from giving it a try. I just want to avoid anyone else who finds it hard from feeling bad about themselves. I don't feel guilty for not embracing it wholeheartedly.

I don't really have one. I think experience is important, but that experience can be gained in a very wide set of ways. I think freshness and enthusiasm are also important.

I do value communication skills very highly - and the more senior one is, the more important that becomes, in my view. You're likely to have to spend as much (or far more) time explaining your ideas to other people as you are "explaining" them to the computer (aka coding).

Tomas Petricek did the vast majority of the work on "Real-World Functional Programming" (published by Manning) - I tagged along for the ride, but enjoyed doing so. There's a lot in there.

I'm afraid I've never even heard of MERN before - I'm sure you already know more about any reasonable answer to this than I do, I'm afraid.

I think it depends on what you view as "paying dividends". One dividend is enjoyment: are you enjoying the time you're putting in? That's typically easier with a well-asked question.

Another might be skills learned: are you picking up new techniques, new approaches by solving someone else's problem? Are you improving your communication skills?

Another might be the dividend to the world: is your answer making the world a better place, not just for the person who asked the question but others who may be facing the same problem?

And yes, there's rep. A number on a server somewhere. Don't pay that too much attention :) There are effective ways to rack up rep points that don't accomplish anything else nearly as worthwhile. My advice is not to go there. Focus on things that matter, and typically the rep will come as a side-effect, at least in many cases.

It's never really interested me, to be honest. While we're in the maybe-bubble, it's hard to tell whether or not it's actually a bubble. We'll only be able to tell in 5, 10 or 20 years. I don't expect it to reach the top of my list of things I should investigate further any time soon, but that's just me... it doesn't mean it's inherently uninteresting.

I'm fascinated to see how nullable reference types play out, in terms of adoption. That goes for a lot of other things - there's a cadence of adoption, when libraries, tutorials etc start to make it important to know about features. C# 7 tuples don't have much usage yet as far as I've seen, but could become really important over time. Who can say? I'll be watching closely...

I'm interested by the shapes proposals, but I'm not sure whether it might be a bridge too far. (That said, I've usually been wrong about things like that.)

"Extension everything" is interesting, and I'm expecting to have fun using it to come up with some really evil code.

More generally, I'm looking forward to seeing how the C# team thinks about not bringing new features out. How can the language stay relevant without becoming a kitchen sink? Which features will be retained only for backward-compatibility, but not used by new code?

Visual Studio, almost exclusively, for "real" code. I use an emacs-like editor called Jed for general text editing, mostly because I learned it in university, and have muscle memory for it now.

I'm a pretty "shallow" user of most tools - I'm sure there are very useful features in every tool I use that I've just never got round to learning.

I do have SublimeText installed, and tend to use that for non-VS scenarios where I want to do search/replace across multiple files, or to browse a large set of files.

I've played with VS Code several times but never quite become familiar enough with it. Maybe I need to try again.

Well, one apparently has a space in, and the other doesn't. Any further comments I might make would be less informed than that...

Could You Kindly be more specific like; Amoung Two Which One is "One" in Your Reply. THX. Sorry to Ask Silly follow-up Question.

Absolutely, and I've never understood why so many people think this is odd.

Pizza is almost the only context in which I do like pineapple - I find it too stringy in a fruit salad, for example. It's okay in a sweet and sour dish, so long as there isn't too much of it.

But on pizza? Absolutely - and not just for "ham and pineapple". When ordering take-out I'll often start with a meat-based pizza, and swap out pepperoni for pineapple.

I really don't have one, I'm afraid. I suspect it may have some really valuable uses, and plenty of useless ones that people are briefly excited about, but that's just a generic opinion of almost any new technology.

Warning: no experience whatsoever at creating a startup. That said...

Make sure you build a diverse culture from the start. Once you've realized that your company has 50 engineers all of whom are men with the same background, it's going to be much harder to change that.

I would definitely not think about a career to start with. If you're just beginning, you probably don't have enough experience yet to know that it's a career you even want to pursue.

The most important thing I'd suggest is to find a language you get along with and which lets you do things that you find fun and (maybe) useful.

I do think there's a benefit in starting with something small and immediate. If you're right at the start of coding, don't expect to build the next Halo over the school holidays. I like to emphasize small tasks that are still useful or fun. For example, if I'm learning a new language, I'll implement a little guess-the-number game. That's a small, achievable task that has a concrete, interactive goal.

Or as an example of more useful-for-existing-activities skills, I've learned most of what I know about spreadsheets (which isn't much) by coming up with scoring sheets for board or card games (Scrabble, Mexican Trains, The Great Dalmuti etc).

When you're starting to get serious, I'd try to get a solid foundation on which to build - but that's probably not something for the very first few weeks of coding, where you're constantly experimenting. You don't want to spend ages on academic-sounding (though important) topics just to play a bit. There's a balance here...

I use my .NET skills all the time at work. You can follow along with the vast majority of the code that I write, as it's on github, mostly in github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-dotnet. (I do plenty of work that isn't coding of course.)

That's only been the case for the last few years, but it's made my life happier. Java is the only other language I know to any kind of production quality, and frankly I haven't kept up with the new versions as well as I'd like to.

Will C# ever be a "blessed" language in Google? Who knows. I'd be somewhat surprised, but stranger things have happened. For the moment, I'm very happy to "merely" make the Google Cloud Platform experience as awesome as I can for C# developers.

Persist: it will be hard, you will make mistakes, it will be frustrating - but it can also be absolutely wonderful.

(I'm being good and sticking to one thing. I could give a shortlist of maybe five that would all be pretty close - and might become the "one thing" on any particular day...)

My daughter recently started universitet for computer science. I want to say something profound to enspire her but haven't been able to come up with anything. I will pass on your advice. Thank you.

This is probably a pretty personal question - I suspect people learn in different ways. (And I know far fewer technologies than people seem to expect me to. If you're a web developer, you probably know more languages than I do, to start with...)

If you know you're going to need to know a language/platform well (rather than "just enough to get by") then I'd recommend starting at the basics, and layering the knowledge. That's far more effective in my experience than diving straight into a mobile app with a cloud backend, all written in unfamiliar languages and deployed using a tool you've never used before. When something goes wrong, if you have a solid foundation, you can generally work out where to go from there. If you're mired in 10 different technologies which are new to you, you may well have no idea where the problem lies at all - or how to diagnose it.

Diagnostic skills are really important to me. If I'm going to do any work in a particular area, I want to be able to do at least one of three things pretty easily: a) run tests; b) use a debugger; c) write logs. Ideally all three, but having at least one is important.