Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
sonyaellenmann.com
Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#2Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#3Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these.
In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#4>Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place.
No. There's a lot, A LOT of resources online for beginners.
let the nerds run SO, it's perfect as it is for people who know what they are doing.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#5Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#6Part of the problem IMHO is, that SO tries to be two things at once. It says, it shall be a help portal for programmers, but at the same time they want to be something like Wikipedia for programmers.
Both things do not fit well together. When you want to help others, you must allow any question that is earnest. When you want to be an encyclopedia, you have to filter questions very harshly.
Sadly, together with this, the self-moderation feature of SO attract people that are more interested in enforcing rules, instead of helping people.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#7Back in 2009 and 2010 I used to participate heavily on SO. I asked and answered questions and it was a great resource for me.
At some point I stopped needing it, my questions became too specific and I got tired of answering the same questions. At that point I had about 20k karma points.
I've recently needed to ask a few answerable questions so I went back. All my questions were closed or down voted and people reduced me for asking such bad questions with 25k karma.
SO is now useless unless your question fits exactly into some mold they require, ie questions someone with 2-3 years experience might ask.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#8Lesson learned is that if Google returns a result that doesn't appear to match your request, then ctrl-f is your friend. This applies in many areas besides programming.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#9This looks like a problem that would be solved by splitting that Python manual page. All the information is there, it's just that the whole page is rather long and it's possible to miss that it is in there.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#10When I was getting started I occasionally got some angry responses on SO. In the end it was good for me. People were willing to point me in the right direction but when you don't even know the fundamentals they're just wasting their time and doing the work for you. If you take the time to learn the fundamentals, any basic question you have already has an answer on SO and you will be able to use it.