This discussion is making me think that Stack Overflow has a solid opportunity to rethink how their architecture/approach could be redesigned to minimize questions that get closed due to redundancy or other reasons. One could indefinitely kick the can by saying the user should have known how to use SO better, but the questions keep popping up and getting closed. I for one personally have only ever found useful data downthread in closed questions. You could say that means the design is working, but it would still seem like a ridiculous, even risible design.
Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#52A worthwhile article; thanks. I do think it could be improved with a link to esr's "How to Ask Questions the Right Way".
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#53I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion. From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
I was discussing this yesterday with some people on IRC, and thought of writing a blog post about this myself.
Despite me being a very experienced programmer (I started to learn coding when I was 6 years old), I find SO extremely hostile.
Examples: One question of mine from 2010 got vote closed in 2014 (yes, people will hunt down questions even that later!) and now has vote deletes, also the same question the most upvoted answer is a snarky answer (copy paste of the answer: "You can't eat your cake and have it too.")
Recent questions: They all get downvoted and vote-duplicate even when they aren't.
I made some questions about RDTSC, people kept arguing with me about how I was doing something wrong, my CTO is retarded, or that I was retarded, or whatnot... and all I wanted was to fix some games (RDTSC behaviour changed from counting CPU cycles, to count whatever arbitrary frequency the hardware wants, this break old games that rely on it counting literal CPU cycles).
Another was when I asked details about some bizarre behaviour of Objective-C in recent versions of XCode, people said it was dupe (not exactly), that I was retarded, that it was all in the fucking manual, or that I could google it, and noone EVER replied with a single official answer.
I asked then on Quora, found out that XCode DO have non-standard behaviour (ie: stuff that ins't in Obj-C standard, and ins't in official distribution of LLVM), and that the Apple manual is wrong, thus no wonder why I wasn't finding the info on the manual or on google.
I asked about these issues on Stackoverflow Meta, got attacked, downvoted, deleted, etc... no meaningful discussion.
I am impressed that some people went to great lengths to argue with me without posting a proper answer, one guy even wrote something I considered an answer in the comments, but lacking details, I asked him to expand in an actual answer so I could accept it, and he replied in the comments: "Nah, that would be a waste of bandwidth."
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#54This is just a tip of the iceberg. Junior questions on stack overflow and general attitude towards learning people how to work with the vocabulary and the basic concepts are sort of addressed by many great tutorials (codecombat.com
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#55> 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…
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 documentation sites, like dotnetperls or ss64, which have easy to read documentation.
Besides, at least with SO, it clearly states to search before you ask. The user is only asking because searching wasn't successful. An answer of "go search more" does not help the asker.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#56I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion. From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
Where do you go to for answers? I hate the over zealous moderators, but it does end up answering a lot of my programming related questions.
Yesterday after I complained about Stackoverflow on IRC, and people on IRC could not help me, someone suggested that I asked on Quora.
I did, and they replied :)
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. I feel like StackOverflow after nearly 10 years of closing questions such as 'Which is a better framework X or Y', should be honored at /r/DesirePath. Like at which point do they understand that maybe their desire conflicts with how most community wants to use SO as.
I keep waiting to see a competitor take off because it starts by encouraging those sorts of questions, and then secondarily accepts all the other sorts of questions SO does. Of course it's more difficult to start a new community because of network effects, but a decent place to start might be to find a bunch of the popular closed questions on SO and reach out to the questioner and some of the good answerers to come p…
Have you looked into Slant.co (https://www.slant.co/)
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#58I guess I'm going to be the asshole today :
If someone lets a few rough edges on SO dissuade them from learning, they probably didn't care for any of this to begin with.
I mean, every single one of these traumatized "beginner" comments were sourced from reddit - where there are at least a half dozen subs that would gladly accommodate questions unsuitable for SO.
On a related note, I also don't understand why there is a constant push to coddle beginners to increasingly absurd degrees. It has literally never been easier to learn to program. There are hundreds of resources available to the aspiring learner - more so than any other field I'm aware of. Yet somehow the anal retentiveness of SO is the problem here? Come on.
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#59I can definitely recall how alienating the stack overflow community was to me when I first started learning programming. You ask a simple question and they yell at you to Google it. You ask a complex question and they ask you why you're doing it. My solution was just to close myself off from StackOverflow and try any other community. My experience with IRC hasn't been great, but often my responses were miles better t…
> You ask a complex question and they ask you why you're doing it. As someone on the other side of those questions, perhaps I can explain. Very often, people unfamiliar with a subject area ask questions about solutions, instead of asking about problems. They've done a bit of googling, and have a partial solution. But the solution doesn't work, so they ask "how can I fix this solution." To someone familiar with the pr…
There are so many other ways to answer that though than asking why they are doing it.
Like.
"I would like to help you but I need some more context. What are you trying to do"
Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
#60While it address the situation on stack overflow, this is a problem in general with communities:
-It's my opinion that with enough time communities are
driven and shaped by the leaders this has at least the
following two aspects
-The leaders (assuming they were elected or emerged from
the community) will strength the core values of the
community (look at it as the identity).
-Previous statement can also be read as: they will make
everything they can from prevent the community to
become something they don't like
On the other hand (and I speak for myself here) when I started learning programming I were extremely frustrated with my first Java class for a desktop application, you copy paste something, modify it and then got into a situation where you ask for help.
Years later I did understand all the reasons why my approach was incorrect:
-you can place logic inside the class or outside of it
-You later learn that code should not repeat itself
something called *one source of truth*, how that
drives code from instances to the parents from where
it its inherit
-you later learn or discover that; that's the same
principle behind normalization on databases
-then you learn that behavior respects the same
rules and hence interfaces and contracts
-then you can understand easily mef and maf for
example
-....
Maybe this exemplifies and proves the necessity that can be addressed by a new community, Ask and learn community with rules looking forward to address this kind of learning.