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Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

programmingforbeginnersbook.com

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Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#81

Post by badloginagain »

adekok wrote: post #36
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. 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…

> Stop being annoying, and just help me!

I don't see this, for beginners the reply will be "I'm trying to bake a cake" ... "I need to get milk from the store" ... "I need gas to get to the store"

Each ... is a back and forth focusing on the actual problem. Beginners don't necessarily know what information is useful information. This is why physically working with an experienced developer is so useful, because that exchange (which provides a useful learning experience for the beginner) is so much easier in person.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#82

Post by MaulingMonkey »

hellofunk wrote: post #29
mhurron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned Which will never be learned if you never have to do it.

I disagree. You can definitely be helped to learn how to do this. It is possible to show someone the technique of properly researching a difficult technical problem.

You can certainly show someone the technique. But it will not help if they don't ever attempt to put said technique to practice.

For a given... "repeat customer", I will eventually resort to search links, "What did you try", and then eventually "RTFM", "Google It", etc. - and intentionally not answering the question, to force them to go through the motions - if they don't appear to be doing so.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#83

Post by sanderjd »

I enjoyed this article a lot. It has some really good advice on both the beginner and professional sides that I'll definitely be keeping in mind going forward.

But I think the article, and the comments here, have a bit of a blind-spot: teachers and/or mentors. As much as people seem to want to believe that it's easy to self-learn programming, the issues brought up in this article are among those that give the lie to that idea. There would be tension in any field if untrained beginners were asking questions in the same forums used by experienced professionals.

Questions like "javascript while loop not working" demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding that professional support forums like SO and IRC are not designed to address. Most fields recognize that those sorts of fundamentals are best learned with the support of teachers who can evaluate what is missing in a student's mental model and answer questions in a way that builds knowledge. I don't see what makes us think our field is so different.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#84

Post by Shog9 »

Over the past few years, we've put together a couple of (reasonably short) guides to asking questions on Stack Overflow; if you're a beginner (or simply struggling to learn the Stack Overflow way of doing things), it wouldn't hurt to read them:

- http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

- http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve

Disclaimer: I work for Stack Overflow, but these were mostly written by folks who don't and who just wanted to see new users have an easier time - I just edited them.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#85

Post by aje404 »

I don't really think this article warrants a serious conversion.

He leads with "I’m not endorsing either side", then proceeds to denumerate every wrong that SO regulars have inflicted on poor, benign newbies, and intersperses it with quotes with hard-working, incipient programmers ( who are, naturally, all from Reddit) who've been abused by oppressed by this ill-tempered cadre of SO devs. Many of them decide to quit the dream they're working so hard at because an experienced developer didn't debug their while loop.

Naturally, he's peddling a book that teaches you how to install a text editor and run hello world. The only travesty here is that he's getting from free publicity for this troll-bait.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#86

Post by adekok »

olig15 wrote: post #77
adekok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I understand where you're coming from, but it's often the way questions are answered that's the problem, as shown in your example. If someone's asking to put diesel in their petrol car, they obviously don't know that's a bad thing to do. Just asking 'Why are you trying to do that' makes you seem like you're trying to be difficult. A better answer would be 'I think you're looking at the problem wrong - diesel won't wo…

The example was just that.. an example. And a short one at that. It was intended to be illustrative, and not a definitive overview of the problem.

In short, the answer you give doesn't matter. What matters is the attitude of the questioner, as shown by AndrewUnmuted, below.

A good questioner can say "That's not a good response. I'm trying to do X because of Y and need help with Z."

A bad questioner says "How dare you question me. Give me an answer now!"

I have 17 years of experience in running an open source project. My conclusion is that the content and/or the tone of my answers are less relevant than the attitude of the questioner.

People who want to solve a problem don't pay attention to the emotional content of an answer. They keep pushing for a solution, no matter how much they dislike the questioner.

People who have an attitude see personal insults in technical responses. An answer of "Your question is answered at URL X" is an offensive response which is intended to personally denigrate the questioner, and insult his intelligence. The only proper response for such a questioner is to insult someone back.

As I said below, the only real solution to such people is to inform them to be polite, and then to ban them. They are toxic.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#87

Post by douche »

badloginagain wrote: post #55
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…

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…

There's also the problem that so much documentation is just straight auto-generated javadocs or xmldocs, with nothing beyond what you'd get looking at the method signatures.

MSDN is better than most, but there's still a ton in there in places that has no examples or usage information, no indication of what valid inputs are, no indication of any other external state that could derp things up.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#88

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

So true. And not just thin skins that get discouraged. After 25 bullies, you stop asking questions. Eventually you hit a brick wall and try asking again, just to meet more glib or hurtful answers. You get discouraged by the death of 1000 cuts. You stop.

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#89

Post by adekok »

badloginagain wrote: post #81
adekok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Stop being annoying, and just help me! I don't see this, for beginners the reply will be "I'm trying to bake a cake" ... "I need to get milk from the store" ... "I need gas to get to the store" Each ... is a back and forth focusing on the actual problem. Beginners don't necessarily know what information is useful information. This is why physically working with an experienced developer is so useful, because that ex…

> I don't see this

Try sitting on an open source mailing list sometime. :(

Re: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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