Have you considered that suggesting people to make copies of copies of copies for the sake of a technical challenge instead of tackling real world problems (even as beginners) might fuel the endless waste of energy that programmers collectively pour into developing useless stuff for their own amusement? In a world where pro-bono software development is very scarce, is this what we want to teach to beginners?
What makes you think that I don't care about other humans?
Your original post essentially claims that people shouldn't do things for their amusement.
From my perspective, without fun, there's no point in even bothering. Why feed myself and my fellow man if all we do is struggle?
I'm not sure that there actually _are_ any more "real" problems to solve in programming, if by "real" you mean things that significantly reduce human suffering. Those problems are political.
I'm not against finding amusement in programming, I'm against in promoting the idea that it's normal, healthy and preferable to find amusement in useless projects. You can be a virtuoso while developing something that matters to somebody, instead of having yet another z80 emulator.
Quite the opposite - the developers of many platforms, say social networks to take an example, have a lot to answer for in the way their "useful projects" have actually had large negative side effects.
I think you're really reaching if you think that someone not spending all of their time on directly productive pursuits that affect the lives of others materially is somehow a problem.
I'd honestly be hard pressed to come up with an idea for a technology I could create tomorrow that would have a real positive impact on humanity (as seperate from say, slightly improving some obscure programming tool). Those problems are political.
I'd say that, generally speaking, we have a moral responsibility not to use any skills we might possess to cause harm to others.
Beyond that, yes. I taught myself to program, and I am still learning. I taught myself to draw and paint, and I am still learning. I taught myself to write fiction, and I am still learning. I learned these skills because I enjoy creating through them, and creating things is what I've found makes my life worth living. I create for fun and for profit (necessary to survive) and, yes, to help others—but if you think you can cast moral aspersions on me or anybody else because we aren't pursuing those three outcomes in a proportion you personally find acceptable, my recommendation for you is to take a step back and get some perspective.
It might not come to you immediately. Likely, you will have to work at it.
I have no problem if you spend some time on pointless stuff, I do it too. I have a problem with the edonistic status quo where to decide a new project the norm is to suggest to do "something you like" instead of "something that is needed". You're pretending that there's a debate and it's 50-50, while the reality is that the perspective is totally skewed towards programmers' amusement.
That's my day job, as a contractor or salaried worker.
In exchange, I get money which I can give to others in exchange for things I need.
You seem to be suggesting that everyone is effectively 'at work' all of the time, and that every activity they do should be chosen based on some sense of virtue. That's a recipe for burnout in my books.
Ah ok, if you actually do something useful at work, that's different. Most people develop useless software at work. You must be privileged or maybe you work for some non-profit. I hope you get a decent salary because these days it's very hard to work on relevant things and get paid well.
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Copying others is a tried and true way of increasing your abilities. Painters don't just start out as masters, they often spend years copying other styles until they find what like themselves. There's only so much the human mind will come up with on its own, being presented with new problems in new domains, and how other people addressed them is one way of increasing ability.
Take the master of any domain, and their past is likely littered with experiments and copies of things that already exist, either because they thought they could do it better or because they wanted to understand that topic better.
Fine, I'm questioning the idea that the goal should be to maximize an hypotethical "programming skill", something that I'm not sure it even exist, I can only see adherence to different subjective definitions of "clean", "orthogonal" or "simple". What's the point of writing aesthetically pleasing software if it sits unused on Github? If you're lucky you can aim at replacing some old tool doing exactly the same thing with the only added value of satisfying the endless desire for novelty of other programmers. Innovations in software are very rare and almost never come from trial and error but most often from academic research. Why should this endless machine of waste reproduce itself over and over?
Good question - where do "learning exercises" end and "useless amusement projects" start?
If I want to learn a new language I might do some fun exercises or hit an online course or a book, both of which contain lots of "useless" toy examples and exercises.
For a high school student this may be a hello world, for a CS professor this can be a small OS.
I believe the "learning exercises" are over when you are able to develop solid real world software with the skills you have but you decided to keep expanding "horizontally" your skillset out of desire for novelty, desire for visibility or just fear of missing out. We all know people with 10 years of working experience that start new libraries to deal with a super-niche engineering problem already solved by 5 other libraries just to say "I made this and it went around" or "All the other libraries suck because they are built on different opinions than mine". Obviously 99% of these projects die very early just to be followed by a new one.
