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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

programmingforbeginnersbook.com

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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#101

Post by pyrophane »

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…

One thing I see a lot of developers (new and experienced) do is attempt to get around having to really understand the language and libraries they are working with by constantly googling whatever problem they are working on at a given time and assuming there should be an example or blog post out there somewhere that will show them exactly what they need to do.

Of course, when the code they find is incorrect, outdated, or not easily applied to their specific situation, they lack the understanding to figure out what they need to do to fix it on their own, so they ask.

This of comes out in the form of a question which, to anyone who has taken the time to build such an understanding, smacks of laziness, hence all of the "RTFM" replies.

And in that case, RTFM is the absolutely the right answer. They need to slow down, read the problem code, figure out what they don't understand, and learn. Maybe they need to slow way down and learn about some of the constructs of the language they are working with. Maybe they need to read the docs for a particular library or framework to figure out what abstractions it relies on. Maybe they just need a high level view of the API so they will know what all is available to them.

Could this be communicated in a more friendly way? Sure. Is it the responsibility of the community to do that? I don't know.

tl;dr RTFM.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#102

Post by tcfunk »

doktrin wrote: post #78
blueatlas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I also don't understand why there is a constant push to coddle beginners to increasingly absurd degrees." Apply this perspective beyond software development. Law, medicine, firemen, teaching a kid to play baseball. Why do we continually look at software development different than other acquired skills? To answer your question directly, it is my opinion that the layers of abstraction that we have today, and that cont…

> Apply this perspective beyond software development. Law, medicine, firemen, teaching a kid to play baseball. Why do we continually look at software development different than other acquired skills? Well, that's a good question. What do you think it takes to break into law, medicine or fire safety? I can assure you that being willing to put in significant work, and tolerating adversity, is a hard requirement for eac…

While too much coddling is probably not helpful, neither is being overly abrasive because "back in my day that's how we learned it".

Holding on to old teaching methods "just because" isn't the right answer, nor will it help the programming profession in the long run.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#103

Post by r_sreeram »

hellofunk wrote: post #29
mhurron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned Which will never be learned if you never have to do it.

I disagree. You can definitely be helped to learn how to do this. It is possible to show someone the technique of properly researching a difficult technical problem.

Agreed. This is one of the things I appreciated about the now-defunct Google Answers. The professionals there would not only answer your question, but also include a set of steps that they tried, including Google search terms and such. This let you understand their thought process, the things they tried and the places they looked in, as to how they found the answer.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#104

Post by lucb1e »

mhurron wrote: post #22
sotojuan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem with this approach is you make it easier to ask the question than search the documents. Your doing all the work, they just have to sit back and let someone else do it for them.

Not really. The main reason I hate asking questions online is because of the delay in getting a response. Even if I could get the correct answer on a silver plate every time, I'd prefer finding out in a timely manner by myself so I can get on with the thing I'm doing.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#105

Post by Flimm »

gravypod wrote: post #93

I consider myself a fairly seasoned programmer. I have written countless lines of code, work on a few projects with friends, and automated most of my computer-related tasks. I've been doing this since I was 12, and I am 19 at the time of writing this. I can say with confidence, I have never been able to successfully ask a question on stack overflow. I think I have been banned at least once, or they deleted my account…

I have had a couple of my questions closed for reasons that I disagree with, so I can sympathise there, but to me it sounds incredible that someone would be banned just for asking programming questions. You say you think you've been banned, could you check and let us know what actually happened? Did you really get banned?

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#106

Post by ktRolster »

krschultz wrote: post #91
marknutter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. And here we have a prime example of why beginners find the programming community to be so abrasive, and worse, it's sitting at the top of this comment thread. Ask yourself, would this be the answer you give to a 12 year old girl who's taken an early interest in programming? Or a single mother who's…

Yes, it is the answer I would give to a 12 year old girl. First off, why does your 12 year old have to be a girl? You are spouting off about diversity but you basically just used the stereotype that teenage girls are going to cry if you give them the hard truth. Why do we have to treat single mothers with kid gloves? Guess what, diving through some docs is a lot easier than anything a parent has to put up with. 3 of…

  > I always teach my interns to start with the docs.
  > Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or 
  > Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before
  > you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through 
  > it is part of the process of learning. The 
  > things you learn by going through the docs will
  > help you later.
This is a skill I wish more programmers had.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#107

Post by Xcelerate »

Generally speaking, I agree with the article. For some reason, there seems to be a widespread attitude of "meanness" on the internet (actually, perhaps that's just people in general...)

I recall three years ago asking the question "What is dependent typing?" on Stack Overflow. The first commenter replied "Did you try google? wikipedia?" to which I provided a sassy retort (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9338709/what-is-dependent...).

Some people seem to become quickly exasperated with what they perceive as "stupid" questions (e.g. Linus Torvalds). I don't understand why; just ignore them. On the other hand, I get exasperated with mean comments. I frequently upvote people on Hacker News that I disagree with if they have worded their stance in a nice way, and I also frequently downvote people that I agree with if I find their comment particularly rude.

Some feel that rudeness is necessary in order to drive a point home (particularly in politics — lots of mudslinging), but I disagree. It would be interesting to see if any research has been done on this subject: are blunt, mean comments actually effective in certain situations?

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#108

Post by kbenson »

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…

> Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use

My general rule of thumb is the same I use for HN, if you want to comment about something non-related, or make an observation that isn't really relevant, make sure to contribute as well, preferably first in the comment. For StackOverflow, that would be offering a solution, or help in some way before offering as additional observation that "if this were me, I'd do X". For HN this is most commonly useful when making a joke. Unless your joke is insightful and relevant,you're best including some additional content contributing to the discussion at hand.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#109

Post by milkytron »

32bitkid wrote: post #99
marknutter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. And here we have a prime example of why beginners find the programming community to be so abrasive, and worse, it's sitting at the top of this comment thread. Ask yourself, would this be the answer you give to a 12 year old girl who's taken an early interest in programming? Or a single mother who's…

> Ever go to a gym and ask someone how to do a basic lift only to be scoffed at? Ever been to a foreign country and have someone berate you for not understanding how to navigate through some strange process or not knowing how to speak their language well enough? That's not asking, that's demanding that someone teach you. Its a brazen form of entitlement that completely disregards the state of the other person. In reg…

I think the point he was trying to make was don't be a dick. You can deny someone a gym lesson if you don't have time, they shouldn't be too upset about that. Or at least point them in the right direction.

And I think it's a lot easier to be a dick online, which is why programming in particular has a lot of these situations.

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