> work on cars without ever touching a car.

I don't believe the author is saying you should trust someone who has only read about a job to do the job.

Maybe your illiterate mechanic is great. In every case, a professional will be better by absorbing the experience of others, even if just marginally. Learning from experience of others without having to spend the same 1:1 time and cost is a huge win. Certainly we would all agree on that point.

Reading is how knowledge gets transferred indirectly across time and space. I agree there's no better signal of effectiveness than history of results, but with two people who 'get results', considering what can get lost in such metrics, the one who is driven to keep learning from others outside their direct circle is almost certainly better at what they do.

As applied: Two mechanics who 'get results' exist. One spends their spare time pouring over Internet forums to learn about emerging issues, diagnosis techniques, tools improvements, part performance over time, etc. The other goes home and plays WoW, their only new input comes from what arrives at or emerges in their shop. I would always favor the former type. No different with any domain.

> Would you trust a mechanic who didn’t read any books? I sure wouldn’t discount them because of that.

Machinist or woodworker might be a better analogy.

> Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car.

What a weird analogy.

Programming without reading anything (a book, a manual, a guide) just makes you a monkey with a typewriter.

You can become functionally capable in any mainstream programming language with some working examples, newbie hello world tutorials, maybe a debugger, and/or stack overflow. You are unlikely to get past an intermediate level of skill, and you won’t understand the deeper patterns that motivated the language designers, but you can add features and write useful applications.

Is that really a monkey with a typewriter?

Absolutely. I deal with people like that on a day to day basis.

I’m betting that all of us operate that way a percentage of the time. I’m not a zsh expert but I have to edit my zshrc file.

If that’s being a monkey, I guess I’m a monkey. But I bet you are one as well sometimes. I have empathy for people doing their best outside their area of experience, because all of us are that person.

If what you are talking about is people employed as professional C++ developers who have a very superficial understanding of the type system, that’s different. But I still don’t think the term “monkey” applies.