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Knowledge vs Experience

I was asking this question the other day to myself as to why knowing a technology well, before using it is very important. Now, let me state for the record that i am an all out proponent of "learning on the fly". I think that there are too many things out there to learn, and life is just too short to learn most of those things and then to do something with that knowledge. But then again there have been situations in the past where i saw some dramatic changes happening in the whole code base in major software products. All those changes were because of an error which was occurring due to some constraint of the underlying technology/platform, which the coder did not account for while coding, simply because he was not aware of it. And the funny bit is that days were spent in trying to figure out what the issue was in the first place. So much of time and effort wasted, simply because one did not study, or shall i say did not have the time to study, the whole technology base in good detail. All that time spent in diagnosing the issue could have been spent in studying more about the technology before the coding even began. In most situations a coder will always be Googling for a piece of information which is pertaining only to his code and its context. Never, will he go out of his way to actually study more about a particular programming concept or technology. Have we gotten so busy with our work that we no longer have time to learn? If so then it is alarming! Many feel that this is what experience is all about. It experience that gives everyone the knowledge required to tackle all sorts of situations, foreseeable and otherwise. But then again i have seen experience failing as well. There is that much of knowledge involved, generated and required every day of our professional lives. I personally think that growth should be slow and steady. More knowledge about a particular area will only lead to better decision making abilities in that area. Each time i ask a question, people have a very cool and standard reply to it: "just Google it...". Ironically, i find most of my answers in discussion forums where people were asking the same or similar questions. Look, Google is not God. It does not know everything. It just takes everyone's knowledge and shows it to everyone. Now, why can we not do the same in smaller units, instead of on the world wide web. While i am seemingly digressing here, understand this, a major reason why our learning processes have reduced is simply due to the fact that we have shut down a lot of learning avenues. To start with we are not inclined to ask or answer questions anymore to each others faces. We have a aversion towards books. We want everything at or from one place alone. And currently as far as knowledge is concerned that place is Google. I have no issues with that, its an amazing resource pool to say the least. But why in the world should we be shutting down other resources at the same time. A good colleague of mine once told me this:
Good coders do not rely on Google.
It was a simple truth. Fight it, and life will make you pay heavily just like in examples of the 1st para of this post. I am still a proponent of "on the fly learning", but i am also an advocate of learning before a test, not after.