Is the ability to find information necessary after 10 years?
In the case where paper books are the primary source of information, it was important to know which book has the information you want to find.
Advancement in search technology has dramatically reduced the cost of finding the information from the electronic source.
Also, the questions and answers service emerged. It is a web service that allows users to submit the question they want to solve and allows other users to submit answers for questions. With the emergence, when you search specific programming problems, the probability to find a solution become high. *1
Advancement of technology lowers the cost of information gathering. Most of the books and papers I mention in this book are digitized. So I can search across them electronically in my PCs and tablets. The questions and answers services are new information source different from books. New information gathering methods are born.
In the era of paper books, it was very important to grasp the overall picture. It is because the search cost was high and it was necessary to narrow down the area where the desired information located. However, I am not sure that it is also important after 10 years.
I am sure about another thing. Since searching is a method to find what someone has experienced and wrote, you can not find answers about what no one has ever experienced. If the information gathering cost of what someone experiences gets cheaper and cheaper, everyone can quickly get them, and more people have to tackle what no one has ever experienced.
- *1: As of 2018, I imagine the service called Stack Overflow. It is in English, and the similar service in Japanese does not grow enough. So I assume the searching in English. I am not sure someday Japanese programmer can get results of sufficient quality, or all of them have to learn English.