Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#2Seems like this article is mainly talking about cognitive dissonance occurring between a hypothetical beginner who imagines Stack Overflow is going to be a congenial conversation, and a hypothetical expert who curates SO as more of a high-viscosity Wikipedia that would ideally be ask once, answer once.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#3I can definitely recall how alienating the stack overflow community was to me when I first started learning programming. You ask a simple question and they yell at you to Google it. You ask a complex question and they ask you why you're doing it. My solution was just to close myself off from StackOverflow and try any other community. My experience with IRC hasn't been great, but often my responses were miles better than what I would get on SO. Honestly, the best advice I can give to beginners is to make friends who know a bit more and go to friends first whenever possible (at the very least to help them make a good SO post with proper terminology, etc.)
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#4I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion.
From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#5Seems like this article is mainly talking about cognitive dissonance occurring between a hypothetical beginner who imagines Stack Overflow is going to be a congenial conversation, and a hypothetical expert who curates SO as more of a high-viscosity Wikipedia that would ideally be ask once, answer once.
To an extent. It also touches on the aggressive jerkishness of a certain segment of the developer world whose practitioners make their bones on a well-nourished superiority complex.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#6I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion. From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
Where do you go to for answers?
I hate the over zealous moderators, but it does end up answering a lot of my programming related questions.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#7This article fails to notice the primary problem with people learning a programming language.
Just as with a real language you learn the highest amount of material by absorbing explanations and expressions by qualified users of the language; not by immediately trying to form sentences as soon as you know 5 words.
A user of a language only becomed a skilled user when their mind contains a large enough corpus of absorbed expressions to imitate and combine.
IOW: Yes, the newbie does need to read the manual first. And after that some working code. (Though admittedly many manuals are crap and recommending a good, useful and fitting manual is a skill in itself that is lacking in many professionals.)
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#8> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all.
Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it,
No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it.
Someone asking a question that is answered in the documentation or has been asked and answered over and over should be pointed at those sources. One of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem.
This goes especially for places like StackOverflow which is not a discussion forum. It's value is diminished by asking and answering the same questions over and over.
EDIT: I'll mention the last part of the statement I quoted too, it's unfortunate the lumped the second half of the statement with the first.
> correct their grammar, or give your opinions about their choice of technology
Correcting grammar is not helpful in any way in this context. If you can't understand what they're getting at, ask for clarification. Nitpicking grammar is just being a dick.
Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use, if what they're using to do what they're trying to do is just so very wrong. And we're talking 'I'm trying to create a pure HTML page to run this Nuclear reactor' levels of wrong. Most of the time, you do need to keep it to yourself. Especially on sites like StackOverflow, which is not a discussion board.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#9I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion. From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
Where do you go to for answers? I hate the over zealous moderators, but it does end up answering a lot of my programming related questions.
I'm not GP, but I often still go there via Google searches that turn up questions, and then discover that a useful question with a great answer has been closed as off-topic to the programming forum. 90% of the time it seems like a legitimate programming question.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#10Does this generalize to diversity? Friction between people of diverse background and mindset.