Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

This is really a complaint about the Python docs. The poster is using a book that makes you look for info that ought to be in the book in a convenient table.

If you search for "Python formatting", you get to [1] which doesn't list the "%r" format effector. Neither does [2], which is the same document for Python 3.6. See, on that page, "Form specification mini-language":

    format_spec ::=  [[fill]align][sign][#][0][width][,][.precision][type]
    fill        ::=  
    align       ::=  "" | "=" | "^"
    sign        ::=  "+" | "-" | " "
    width       ::=  integer
    precision   ::=  integer
    type        ::=  "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "E" | "f" | "F" | "g" | "G" | "n" | "o" | "s" | "x" | "X" | "%"

Not seeing an "r" in there. There's an example further down on the page which uses "%r", but the syntax description and tables do not mention it.

Stack Overflow isn't the one to blame here.

[1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html [2] https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec

SO for true beginners is like asking questions about 16th century French literature when the only french you know is "Je m'appelle Lloyd. Ou est la bibliotheque?". The problem is that beginners don't have the ability to actually know what they are searching for. Trying to ask "how do I do string interpolation in javascript?" means you have to know what string interpolation is in the first place. You're much more likely to get the title "var in text... HALP?!?" filled with details of an XY problem. While I sympathize with it, I'm not going to answer the Nx10th question about async loops. I remember those days, so I try to make it a policy to leave a comment whenever I flag those types of questions. However, trying to make SO "beginner friendly" is doing a disservice to the people who actually use it everyday as well as that person who finally figures out the terminology for what they were looking for in the first place. I can never remember `git rm -r --cached .` any time I change my .gitignore, but finding that is super easy only because "what is git" doesn't float to the top above it. I'm definitely not encouraging being an asshole, but it's a simple case of using the right tool for the job. SO isn't that tool when you're at that stage.

The problem of writing documentation is that it's not possible to write it to suite every person. While most documentation certainly can be improved upon it's always the matter of where to best spend my time. Developing a feature or document an old feature in yet another way to serve people with a different mindset than my own.

With the risk of sounding a bit of "it's programming it's meant to be hard", I feel the author is a bit spoiled. It's not as if the information wasn't there, she just needed ctrl-f "%r". This is also something you need to learn when learning how to program. In fact I would say that looking up information online is a fundamental programming skill (it didn't use to be, back in the days it was finding stuff in books, but we're mostly past that now, ctrl-f is so much nicer). So she just learned a very valuable lesson, I'd say.

I'm a user with 150k rep on SO. I'm not a casual user.

However, I have been discouraged from using the site in recent years due to too many disagreements over closing and downvoting questions when actually just getting a little bit more clarification from the person asking the question would have helped a lot more.

I've answered over 1,000 questions, ranging from very simple beginner level to some things that took a good deal of research or debugging to answer. I've seen my fair share of poor questions. If a question is completely off topic, then sure, I click the "close" button immediately.

However, if it's on topic, and about some identifiable issue, but not specific enough, too poorly worded, or doesn't include a code sample, or the like, then I post a comment requesting clarification, and listing how they can improve their question. In some cases, they actually work with me, improve the question, and then I or someone else can answer it. In some cases, they just ignore my comments or continue with requests to just give them the code or the like, in which at that point I find it worth a downvote or close vote.

But a lot of the times, I've seen perfectly good questions that were just a little confusingly worded, however I was able to tease out what they were getting at, I've done some research to find the answer, and come back, only to find the questions closed. Now I have an answer for the question, but can't actually post it. If I vote to reopen, sometimes even after editing it to clarify or getting the OP to edit it, it will generally languish with one or two reopen votes. Sometimes I'll then post on meta to complain about this behavior; people being way to quick to close. This will frequently lead to enough people clicking through to reopen it, but also a torrent of complaints about how the question really is bad and how we shouldn't let this kind of stuff on the site because it's destroying the community.

The thing is, bad questions don't destroy the community. If they're bad questions, they'll generally fall off the front page and get forgotten about. They don't really cause much in the way of problems; they're just a few extra bits. But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they're doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners.

I think that Stack Overflow is a very different thing than MathOverflow. Professional programmers sometimes run into thing that they need to do that they are complete beginners at; you may have years of experience writing Java, but then you wind up needing to integrate with and write a plugin for something written in Ruby, and you really have very little experience with it and so don't know where to look. Due to the huge numbers of different languages, APIs, platforms, and so on, rapid pace of change, and shortage of qualified people with the exact relevant experience, almost everyone is a beginner at something they are doing at some point in their career.

Furthermore, some people just don't know how to ask good questions online. It's a skill that takes some time to learn. If you're asking a question to someone in person, they may already have more context about what you're doing, or will be able to more easily ask you questions to clarify and sit down with you to work through it, while asking good questions online can involve a certain amount of preparation in advance to narrow the issue down to a self contained, reproducible test case, to phrase the question appropriately, and so on.

So while I agree that complete junk should be closed and delete, and people who just post "plz gimmeh teh codez" should be discouraged, I am really frustrated by the way people extend that to things that are just beginner questions, poorly worded questions from people who aren't good at asking questions online or aren't good at English, or the like.

Well, that's ok, that's not the place to ask the question.

Or is it ? How do you find a better place ? Probably use google and find yourself back on SO / Whatever SE again. That's the biggest problem. The #1 source of information does not accept dumb questions.

And anyway, what is a dumb question ? Lots of question on SO are pretty dumb. Useful, because they save you 1 hour parsing the doc/spec, but dumb because well that's literally a chapter in the manual. Ask OP question on Swift 2 years ago and it was ok (despite the doc being readily available too), ask it today it is dumb, ask it on java, dumb again.

That would be like going on wikipedia and you would only find information about Game of Throne Season 4, 5 and 6, but the pages on Season 1, 2 and 3 have been closed because a real Game of Throne enthousiast shouldn't need that information.

I sort of see SO goals. Curated set of responses, move with the technology, etc. But the human side of the site is still firmly and proudly stuck in the worst of the 90's.