But ... these kids aren't professionals. They're just
LEARNING.
That's just the problem: they are NOT learning, and have
no interest in learning.
If they were taking apart programs in order to find
out how they worked, that would be learning. But they are taking apart programs
to stick bits into their own program in the hope that some of the "coolness"
will rub off: with no understanding of what they are doing.
The worst part
(and the lesson they will take into adult life) is that understanding is
unimportant: getting something which "works" (at least, well enough for the
demo) is all that matters. If it breaks, just keep fiddling with the code,
pasting in more junk, until it appears to work again.
Anyone who
insists on understanding everything in a complex system before
touching it, will
never be able to touch a complex system.
This is an example of the
attitude I am complaining about: the attitude which says "Modern systems are too
complex to understand how they work, so the only thing you can do is fiddle with
them until they do roughly what you want."
If a system is too complex to
understand, then it is too complex full stop. (You can be sure that there are
endless bugs and security holes hiding in the complexity). Linus regularly
rejects kernel patches because the code is too complex for him to understand. If
he doesn't understand how the code works, he won't add it to the kernel,
regardless of how "cool" it is. And a good thing too!
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