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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

programmingforbeginnersbook.com

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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#131

Post by SilasX »

marknutter wrote: post #79
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…

> 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…

>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 trying to switch careers to improve her lot in life? Or your own mother, for that matter? Is it really constructive to be so abrasive?

It depends on what "RTFM response" we're talking about. if it's simply,

1a) "Duh, read the docs" 1b) "RTFM"

then yes, it's abrasive and experienced programmers should cut it out. But we sometimes get the same flack for

2a) "Ah, that's called the controller and section 7 covers it."

2b) "Oh, I see. The term you're looking for is database indexing -- you should be able to get some good hits with that search term. Or 'add mysql index' for your case."

If someone is really like the diligent younger-me programmer you're referring to, they'll have already explained why the manual doesn't help.

You have to be careful not to equate the two kinds of levels of work (though obviously, politeness is always important, regardless of their level of effort).

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#132

Post by ktRolster »

Mithaldu wrote: post #123
kough wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

"The only true way is with Dijkstra's programming textbook that starts with proofs." It will prevent you from becoming braindamaged from BASIC (or Python :) )

http://www.amazon.com/Method-Programming-Edsger-W-Dijkstra/d...

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#133

Post by ktRolster »

gglitch wrote: post #2

Seems like this article is mainly talking about cognitive dissonance occurring between a hypothetical beginner who imagines Stack Overflow is going to be a congenial conversation, and a hypothetical expert who curates SO as more of a high-viscosity Wikipedia that would ideally be ask once, answer once.

The article is mainly a blog post attempting to build hype for the author's book.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#134

Post by rimantas »

marknutter wrote: post #79
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…

> 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…

I do remember how I started programming. I had no computer and no access to it when I got intereseted in it, so I just read every article I came across. Later, I started to buy the books I came across—that was before the www. So yes, I firmly believe, that you need to try yourself, and try hard. There was a quote, I cannot find the source any more, but it was going something like this: like in mountaineering you should not help begginers to avoid them being killed higher up.

Btw, do you realize that your remark about diversity is sexist by itself? It assumes that females are not able to cope with the same conditions males do.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#135

Post by badloginagain »

metaphorm wrote: post #97
badloginagain wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an intermediate developer I still have trouble with many source documentation. . It's a problem of information density- I don't know where on the page to get what I need, or the documentation examples have very basic implementation that don't cover my use case. And as a beginning developer you don't have the library of personal experience to work-around use cases. Usually I have to find a third party simplified do…

learning how to read technical documentation is a skill in its own right, and we all need to practice it in order to get good at it. obviously some documentation is better than others, and asking specific questions to fill in the gaps where documentation is unclear is a good thing to do. however, programming is very much driven by learning how to find the answers to problems on your own. often those answers are in th…

> all of these technical reading skills need to be practiced. beginners frequently make the mistake of denying themselves opportunities to practice those skills by simply asking for someone to tell them the answer.

These are skills that develop over a programmers career. And when you have issues like getting a for loop going, or if you can have a for loop in a while loop, then reading the documentation is not going to be very useful. Again, information density and assumed level of programming competence in source documentation won't help if you are trying to figure out fundamental programming issues.

Should people read documentation, of course, but the usefulness of documentation increases with programming ability.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#137

Post by Chris2048 »

marknutter wrote: post #79
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…

> 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…

> I'm starting to understand why we have such a problem with diversity in our field

That would be true if men were treated any differently. If anything they are treated worse.

Kid gloves can preserve flighty women in IT, but it's not the reason there's so few.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#139

Post by mettamage »

I am surprised that no one linked the What Have You Tried article by Matt Gemmell.

http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/

This is how I almost never got my SO topics closed. I state beforehand what I have tried, how certain SO questions may look related but are still not giving me enough knowledge to solve my problem. I do my best to make a convincing argument that I need help and can't make it on my own. A few days later and I get my answer :) (and sometimes I figure it out myself which takes a while)

I agree with the HNers that say that someone needs to struggle a bit first. It's necessary to develop the emotional coping skills, because programming can have very frustrating moments. And they can answer "what have you tried?"

Beginners need to understand: why would I put more time into solving someone else's problems than the person asking me the question? I notice that a lot of friction comes from that place. Sometimes beginners don't realize it, but I've seen some lazy people as well. When I am on the beginning side I really try to take this into account and value the time of the expert.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#140

Post by 32bitkid »

There are only three reasons why people answer questions on stackoverflow:

1. fake internet points 2. a genuine interest in the question/problem 3. get paid to do it

I don't know anyone who sticks with stackoverflow very long if #1 is their primary motivation.

And group #3 is a pretty small percentage of users whose companies have off loaded support onto SO, but they are paid real money to answer whatever question someone posts, so they will put up with a lot.

But leaves, in my opinion, #2 is being the majority of people actually answer questions on stackoverflow. Which I think breaks down to an aspect of question-asking that is often overlooked. Given that I am not just waiting around to help you, then it is up to you, question-asker, to motivate me to want to take time out of my day to answer your question.

At the worst, are people who asks questions with a chip on their shoulder, as if the internet is broken or the people who wrote the documentation committed some personal foul against them, and its up to the rest of the internet to make it up to them. I have absolutely zero motivation to help that person. Then there are the people that but no effort into either composing the question or finding thier own answer, a question that can be answered trivially enough by copying the title of the question into google and looking at the results. Again, you have failed to motivate me to answer your question.

Then comes the good questions, the ones that tell a story, that entice me into wanting to help this person achieve their goals. I want to help you, but have other things to do, give me a reason to procrastinate and help you figure out your problem/misunderstanding. Tell me a story of what you are trying to do, what you tried and failed, let me see your thinking process that went into it. It's up to you to build a social bond that I care enough to help you.

That, to me, is your job as "the asker". Make me want to help you, and when it's done we can both feel good about what happened. If you can't take the time to do that, then there is little point in me helping you. I, honestly, have more important things I should be doing.

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