I agree in principal, but: The people at the frontier aren't alone at the top of a mountain, they still have each other for guidance. The master that transcended limits while in isolation is a literary trope.
This doesn't contradict my point at all, I agree entirely that people work with each other and it's a great way to learn. And obviously people aren't going to achieve what took tens of thousands of person-hours at the highest level in one lifetime on their own. One does need to stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.
But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.
For what it’s worth that tracks with me experience in video games.
When I sat with 30 other testers for 6 days per week I achieved mastery I did not believe possible. Eventually I could cakewalk even the most difficult challenges in those games and I was generally recognized as a highly talented tester.
Meanwhile I’ve sunk more cumulative hours alone into Elden Ring and I have accepted I will never reach that same level of mastery.
It’s a humbling realization how much of my prior greatness was actually just my environment at the time.
Since I work in a strongly typed languages the last two will fail to compile and are thus not worth the bother - those who don't have that luxury of course need to test the edge cases that apply to them. The first are maybe, in my experience they are rarely a problem, but we need to go from the abstract to the particular algorithm before we can have a discussion on if they are potentially a problem or not.
In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as adjective-like modifiers.
By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.
An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow.
The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject.
For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red.
This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading".
Did you read the second sentence of that paragraph? The same thing would happen with a legit adjective, like if the forum had been named "FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets, not financial prudent hedges."
It's possible those arguments are correct. I wouldn't give up Google and SO, but I suspect I was learning faster when my first stop was K&R or a man page. There's a lot of benefit in building your own library of knowledge instead of cribbing from someone else's.
Of course no-one's stopping a junior from doing it the old way, but no-one's teaching them they can, either.
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