As a self taught programmer, I went from a beginner to an intermediate level by learning from websites and books.
My suggestion to beginners would be to read some stuff about the technology they want to use, then read and implement a few tutorials where they will make example apps, etc. This clarifies the terminology and makes it easier to describe the problem, read docs, etc. Because 99% of beginner problems have already been answered on StackOverflow.
I have had some bad experience with SO but it was mostly due to not searching properly. I definitely understand how beginners feel. But if someone kept asking me how to reverse an array in C++ repeatedly, even I would be pissed.
Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
121–130 of 187 posts
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#122> 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…
> 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?
Ever asked a stranger out and been shot down harshly?
Part of the reason some people learn to respond this way is because there are so many people bothering them. One or two wouldn't be an issue. It may even be a small boost that they turn to you. But when it is person #6214, with the same problem, and the same solution, which is well documented for someone out there, it gets hard to keep responding kindly. In the same way that you aren't likely to be as nice saying no to the #6214 person interrupting you at a bar to ask you out.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pretty sure the best way to learn a new language involves lots of time practicing speaking. It isn't. It really isn't. :) While it is a big part, and necessary if you actually want to talk to people, in terms of time spent it is much more important to get the vocabulary in and as much exposure to expressions of the language by competent users as possible. That's why people recommend travelling to where a language o…
I dont think we're disagreeing. I don't suggest speaking practice to the exclusion of literary practice. In this comment you acknowledge the importance of speaking practice. That's what was missing from my reading of your first comment. I responded largely because I understood your comment to suggest (explicitly and through analogy) that new programmers study books before attempting to write code and interact with th…
Actually, i do. Completely. I acknowledge practicing is important, but attempting to write code before having gone through a full book and having read some real world code is only going to be damaging for a new learner.
Plus, newbies who refuse to actually read a book front-to-end annoy the ever-living shit out of help channel people, because they end up asking all the stuff that the book would explain fo them, and the chat people end up being nothing but an interactive and abusive book.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea it looks like I was banned and it looks like I was banned more then once. I have an @gmail email address, and one at a custom domain I use professionally. I cant login to either. It also seems like I am not the only one: https://np.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1wpbhv/i_e... That was linked in the article. I spent that entire week upset because I felt I did something wrong (this was back when I was like…
If you had hit the automatic question block, you would still be able to log in. And if you were manually suspended by a moderator, you also would be able to login. Account deletion is only used for spammers, sock puppets used for vote fraud and for persistent trolls. You can get blocked on SO from asking questions if you ask too many heavily downvoted and/or closed questions without a lot of positive contributions, b…
>You can get blocked on SO from asking questions if you ask too many heavily downvoted and/or closed questions without a lot of positive contributions, but accounts aren't deleted just because someone asks a few bad questions
Yes, that was it. I asked two questions, and was banned for it.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#125Earlier 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? Ever asked a stranger out and been shot down harshly? Part of the reason some people learn to respond this way is because there are so many people bothering t…
The problem is, person #6214 doesn't know they're person #6214. If you're making yourself available for questions then you don't get to bitch about the questions you receive. It'd be like a person working an information booth getting angry at someone asking where the bathroom is.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yea it looks like I was banned and it looks like I was banned more then once. I have an @gmail email address, and one at a custom domain I use professionally. I cant login to either. It also seems like I am not the only one: https://np.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1wpbhv/i_e... That was linked in the article. I spent that entire week upset because I felt I did something wrong (this was back when I was like…
[deleted]
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#127> 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…
What you do when the accumulated knowledge, is wrong? Example: I've been getting hostile responses on StackOverflow when asked about RDTSC and MS QPC, and about some strange behaviour of XCode compiler. Found out that both MS and Apple has wrong documentation, and that XCode compiler indeed does things differently than the official LLVM distribution (And way different from the published Obj-C standard). How I am supp…
> How I am supposed to know that without asking
> someone that already knows?
Usually when I run into compiler bugs, I look at the assembly output to make sure.
I don't know why you were messing with RDTSC, but usually when I need a high resolution timer I use clock_gettime() or gettimeofday(). The former doesn't work on OSX, but the latter does, and mach_absolute_time() or clock_get_system_nanotime() seem to work on OSX if you really need them.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#128> 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 of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem.
Exactly. And as the article was trying to explain, this is a skill which needs to be learned like any other kinds of skill.
Shouting RTFM means you demand that skill from the poster or even insult them for not having it - what you're not doing is giving the poster any help or encouragement in developing the skill.
A better solution would be to link them to the relevant previous discussion or documentation page or telling them what to google. This way you can actually bring the poster forward without causing duplicate discussions.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#129The programming professional culture described in the article is a grown-up version of hacker culture seen in old newsgroups and IRC rooms. It's somewhat of a rite of passage for a beginner to first lurk in these communities and learn just enough to know how to ask the right questions to not get yelled at.
Oh, you reminded me there's actually a tutorial for that:
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you had hit the automatic question block, you would still be able to log in. And if you were manually suspended by a moderator, you also would be able to login. Account deletion is only used for spammers, sock puppets used for vote fraud and for persistent trolls. You can get blocked on SO from asking questions if you ask too many heavily downvoted and/or closed questions without a lot of positive contributions, b…
>You can get blocked on SO from asking questions if you ask too many heavily downvoted and/or closed questions without a lot of positive contributions, but accounts aren't deleted just because someone asks a few bad questions Yes, that was it. I asked two questions, and was banned for it.
Here's what SE has to say about auto-blocking: http://stackoverflow.com/help/question-bans
> ... The exact formula for the bans is not disclosed, but users are only banned if they have a significant number of heavily down-voted, zero-voted, or deleted posts. One or two bad posts will not cause you to be blocked from using the site.
So what happened is definitely against current SO policy and auto-banning rules. If you want to share the question URLs and your SO user id to help sort out what happened, I'd be happy to assist, I can see deleted posts, I'm a fan of SO and I would raise a ruckus if I had proof that new users were banned after asking two programming questions.