You can jump into any codebase and solve core architectural problems like precise garbage collection, eventual consistency, or miscellaneous dead locks? I'm not making up contrived examples, these are some of the problems my friends and I are currently dealing with at work for different companies.
> I would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit? Am I suddenly a useless programmer because lazyjones only likes people who studied CS?
I've never had to do integer => string conversion until asked in an interview either and I still did it. It's not a difficult problem. Anyone with a basic understanding of division and string manipulation should be able to reason out a solution.
> You have picked an arbitrary, and extremely rare in the programming world, standard. No-one needs to write their own string handling routines any more.
I wrote my own C++ string library before std::string was introduced. I contribute to Rust which has its own string, big number, vector libraries and much more. The web site I work on gets >130M monthly uniques and we have extended Python's string, dictionary, iteration, and datetime modules because the standard library isn't enough.
> [Programming languages are] all pretty much the same after you've used 3 or 4.
Then you haven't used enough languages. Try functional programming via Haskell, or dependent typing via Coq, or concurrency via Erlang, or memory safety via Rust.
The world is a really big place. I know people infinitely smarter than me doing incredible things, and there are many more like them. Stop being limited by your own experiences.
