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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

programmingforbeginnersbook.com

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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#11

Post by crdoconnor »

nv-vn wrote: post #3

I 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 t…

>You ask a complex question and they ask you why you're doing it.

How is that alienating?

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#12

Post by splintercell »

froh42 wrote: post #4

I 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.

Same here. I feel like StackOverflow after nearly 10 years of closing questions such as 'Which is a better framework X or Y', should be honored at /r/DesirePath.

Like at which point do they understand that maybe their desire conflicts with how most community wants to use SO as.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#13

Post by Armisael16 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #11
nv-vn wrote: post #3

I 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 t…

>You ask a complex question and they ask you why you're doing it. How is that alienating?

Being dismissed or interrogated for every single question you ask is certainly alienating.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#14

Post by hellofunk »

mhurron wrote: post #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…

I would say that the real help lies in between. You don't go out of your way to explain something that is explained somewhere else already. But, you can go out of your way to show the person where it is explained or even what to search for. Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned; a meta-skill, if you will. Whenever a developer has told me in the past to RTFM, aside from the rudeness of this abbreviation, it really is no help. If they gently said, "the API docs for the UIViewController class, which are located , shows the function in question, and how it is used." etc.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#15

Post by kough »

Mithaldu wrote: post #7

This 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 abso…

I'm not sure your analogy between programming languages and spoken languages supports your point. Pretty sure the best way to learn a new language involves lots of time practicing speaking. The analogy would then support trying to program as much as possible in a new language, rather than just reading books about it. Not sure if this was supposed to be a joke; I thought it was fairly well established that it's common and even encouraged for new programmers to start exploring and writing programs as soon as possible. Am I misinterpreting your comment?

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#16

Post by cballard »

froh42 wrote: post #4

I 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.

I asked a question on a Stack Exchange site (not SO) that was immediately reported as a duplicate. It wasn't, the duplicate wasn't even close in multiple ways, and someone else jumped in to defend the question - he was then upvoted by several people. Despite this, there is a permanent prompt to either accept that the question is a duplicate, or to edit my question and explain why it isn't.

This is nonsensical, because the reason that it isn't a duplicate is inherent in the question itself. I'm not sure how I would edit it without writing a non-sequitur. Even though I've actually accepted a correct answer, I cannot get rid of the prompt.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#17

Post by sotojuan »

mhurron wrote: post #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…

My approach is to answer the question and then tell them they can find the answers faster in the manual/docs.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#18

Post by renlo »

StackOverflow is a good place for intermediates and up. IRC is a better place for beginners, but truly if people are just starting out they need a dedicated teacher, or they need a good manual / tutorial that they read front to back. Most beginners don't read the manual / tutorial front to back; they try things immediately once they've read about them and their code understandably break. In this case they need a dedicated teacher, a person they can ask uninformed questions to. StackOverflow is the wrong tool for that.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#19

Post by jeremysmyth »

froh42 wrote: post #4

I 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.

and frowns on those that might involve discussion

No, it explicitly forbids questions that involve discussion.

The point of Stack Overflow is (and to a large extent always was) to be the place for definitive answers (and their alternatives) to well-asked questions. It is not a place for discussions, ranked opinions, interesting conversations, or anything else that does not have a "right" or "best-guess" answer.

It so happens that many questions are interesting to the community of people who visit Stack Overflow, but that doesn't mean they are contextually appropriate. If you want a discussion, go elsewhere. This isn't just a "if you don't like it, leave" judgement: it's explicit in the design and mission of the site[1]. There are better places to discuss things, just not on Stack Overflow.

[1] "This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat...Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.", from http://stackoverflow.com/tour

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#20

Post by hellofunk »

froh42 wrote: post #4

I 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.

SO is definitely a club, and the guys who spend all day on that thing are not necessarily any more knowledgeable than others, despite their score.

In fact, many of the most impressive developers I've gotten to know, like Rich Hickey and others, have low scores on the site. You can't judge the contributors by whether or not they know what they are talking about, just whether or not they are addicted to answering questions first before anyone else. And many of them just like the power they have over other users to close and moderate things, often in an unpredictable way.

That said, many of the contributors are genuinely helpful and the site has helped me tremendously in the past. But just as many contributors are narcissistic and think they invented both chickens and eggs.

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