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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

programmingforbeginnersbook.com

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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#61

Post by speeder »

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…

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 supposed to know that without asking someone that already knows?

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#63

Post by PaulHoule »

Code your way out of this one.

Google is awful for programming research for instance if I look for javadocs it is random if I get jdk 6, 7 or 8.

Same for the other dependencies in my code despite the fact that I use maven so the versions of everything are specified.

The how do I question has to be managed on an individual and project basis because in a certain projects we do it the same way so the system has a property we need and we don't care what the stackoverflowers think...

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#64

Post by scott_s »

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…

I think you are misinterpreting what the author means. I understand the author to mean this is good:

"Python strings have a method, rstrip, for that. You can read about it here: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-met.... I find Googling 'python docs x', where x is what you're looking for is a quick way to see if Python has that thing included in the standard library."

And this is bad:

"It's in the docs, google for it."

And even worse, a literal:

"RTFM."

I understand the author to mean that if you want to say the last two things, don't bother.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#65

Post by bargl »

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…

One of my biggest issues with SO is questions that have been answered but the answer is wrong. Updating the answer to be correct is REALLY hard, especially when the user was a one off user, who asked a very good question. They just got a bad answer.

Another issue I see with SO is, a question gets answered then the language advances and boom the answer is now invalidated. So someone asks, "Hey I know it's answered here but I think there's a new answer, or has something changed." Those questions get shut down too which is frustrating.

I think SO should be a source of knowledge but it doesn't handle language versions well or out of date questions well. It doesn't even handle wrong answers well.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#66

Post by ska »

nv-vn wrote: post #3

I 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."
Without context, it is very hard to differentiate complex questions that are necessarily so, and the much more common case of them being due to muddled thinking or fundamental misunderstanding.

If you are looking for help, the most important thing is to clearly describe the problem you are trying to solve, much more so than the details of the approach you are trying. This leads to a much more productive conversation, and can avoid a lot of back and forth based on mutual misunderstanding.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#67

Post by AcerbicZero »

Personally, I find StackOverflow to be one of the most useful online resources for general/random programming questions. Its not a place that tolerates a great deal of willful ignorance, and does almost nothing to help you if you're not willing to help yourself.

Also, I'm not surprised to see a bunch of comments taken from r/learnprogramming, a subreddit dedicated to helping beginners, being somewhat critical of StackOverflow and its style.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#68

Post by ctstover »

1. Sounds like a market opportunity for a beginner oriented forum, that somehow incentivizes experts to help constructively.

2. The number one sign an expert is an impostor is the way the play the role of a teacher and student.

3. The main thing I hate about SO is the illogical ban on questions that recommend something. At least 80% of my searches that land on a SO page are like, "this is blacklisted by some troll master, because it encourages people to post links to cool and interesting things that might be outside of the box".

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#69

Post by lists »

renlo wrote: post #18

StackOverflow is a good place for intermediates and up. IRC is a better place for beginners, but truly if people are just starting out they need a dedicated teacher, or they need a good manual / tutorial that they read front to back. Most beginners don't read the manual / tutorial front to back; they try things immediately once they've read about them and their code understandably break. In this case they need a dedi…

Speaking from my experience as a self-taught programmer, IRC convos generally follow the same trajectory as OP specifies.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#70

Post by Piskvorrr »

fridek wrote: post #54

This 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

Perhaps that is another issue - "MYYYYY question was cloooosed, that is a MORTAL INSULT TO ME" instead of accepting that mistakes do happen, and even I make them. Did I go out to find knowledge, or did I actually want a pat on the head for being a good schoolboy who never makes a mistake?

This is a (mostly subconscious) theme in most of the SO flamewars: "they are attacking me for trying to find out the Truth" vs. "I'm trying to get to the root of his question, and he's just being stubborn" (I have seen such pointless bickering from both sides; hopefully I have learned something from that?).

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