Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#101

Post by jrcii » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 12:59 AM UTC

Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > 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. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

I am often puzzled by Stack Overflow posts. Very often, the answer or leading link to a technical question I'm searching for is a Stack Overflow post and in the overwhelming majority of those cases the posts are marked as closed for being off-topic.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#102

Post by King-Aaron » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:01 AM UTC

I feel most people who complain about Stack Overflow, are people who rock up without attempting to solve a problem themselves, and then get angry when you tell them to come back with an example of what they've tried. That or they get upset at being told that their question about "how to I make this div tag blue" etc could be answered with three seconds of google searching.

There is a vast number of legitimate, interesting questions that get answered all the time. But this leads the rest of the herd to believe SO is a free homework completion service, then take to their blogs when they get told to fuck off.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#103

Post by exolymph » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:17 AM UTC

Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > 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. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

Nothing on the Stack Overflow page I came to from Google says anything about those cultural norms. This is what it says instead: "Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other." And then the actual answers are snotty people shooting down a newbie. Forgive me for not getting a great impression.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#104

Post by exolymph » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:30 AM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #99

amag wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 au…

I agree with your take on documentation, and I agree that there are some difficult concepts even in basic programming that you just have to work hard to learn. Reading dense documentation is a programming skill, so it doesn't seem ridiculously out of bounds to be still in the process of learning it when on a programming education site. What I'm trying to say is more along the lines of "if you don't have anything nice…

>Saying "oh hey try ctrl f on that documentation page you looked at" would be a valuable response, saying that asking the question is dumb isn't a positive contribution and is likely to make the asker defensive and unlikely to really learn from the experience.

100% — this is the point I was trying to make

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#105

Post by current_call » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:32 AM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #74

current_call wrote: post #54

But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people to ~learn how to code~, then you’re doing it right. I have all the community I want, thanks. If you think I'm being self centered, you have it backwards. I don't care what you do, but you think a community you aren't part of should cater to you.

Problem is a number of us were parts of the community and now treat it mostly as read only.

You mean like what happened to Wikipedia?

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#106

Post by exolymph » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:40 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #61

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…

My point was more about the attitude toward beginners than the actual accessibility of the information, but you're right that Python's docs could be more user-friendly.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#107

Post by exolymph » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #63

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 like…

It would be massively helpful if SO provided this context for people who arrive from Google searching, which it doesn't.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#108

Post by reitanqild » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 2:22 AM UTC

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #95

reitanqild wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing Stack Overflow to the textbook is not very relevant: manuals etc are textbooks. Stackoverflow is a forum with very customized rules. Or if I'm generous: a reference.

Stack overflow is not a "forum". It was born as a mix of forums, blogs, wikipedia and reddit. See our original about page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverf...

I think I knew about you since one of the first announcements. I really liked and still like SO. That's why I care about it at all.

So, honestly, thanks for the hard work you put in. And: hopefully we/you can do even better in the future?

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#109

Post by gbrayut » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

philwebster wrote: post #45

Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place for the answer. I deleted the fir…

Sounds like you ran into one of the spam prevention mechanisms. I've done the same thing before, and usually as long as you do some editing and don't just copy/paste the answer it should let it thru. Or sometimes I leave a comment with a link to the other answer so people can find it.

Sorry you had a bad experience with the site. I hope you try contributing again in the future if you get a chance.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#110

Post by maxlybbert » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 3:30 AM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #36

matthewmacleod wrote: post #23

I do generally agree that Stack Overflow as a community is too enthusiastic about closing down some questions. It's always particularly frustrating to Google for some weird error message and find a Stack Overflow discussion which has been killed off because the question was inappropriate :) But, that said… I'm not sure this is a particularly convincing example of this phenomenon. This is an example of something which…

I think the point the author is making is that what can be easily found in a language's docs is subject to the same learning curve as what can be easily done with the language. Skill in docs reading comes with skill in the practice and understanding the concepts of a technology. Someone can make an honest and unsuccessful search for something that is blindingly obvious to another. If new users have difficulty using t…

The original question (not the blog post, but the question) was "I've been looking for the list Python format characters for a good 30 minutes. I can't find any. ... I need a list with them along with a description if possible please."

What better answer is there than a link to the documentation that has that list? In this case, I don't really care if the person posting the question put any research on their own. They specifically asked for a dump of everything, and got what they asked for. If that wasn't helpful, perhaps they need to ask a different question.