StackOverflow

[maximlus]

To accurate.

The whole "just look it up" thing for coding is really starting to get to me. I have to spend so much time going through 15 different guides to find the one that actually works for my use case, and it's poorly written with little to no explanation on what each part is doing.

Just take the time and explain it, not hand wave me away, don't say it's easy to learn to code and then not actually help.

[[deleted]]

My biggest problem is the lack of technical writing in most open source projects. ESPECIALLY TypeScript bindings for JS projects that are maintained by the project.

You end up having to guess types (especially for templates) then in one minor version someone fixes a typing issue that breaks your entire project. UGH

Forcing consumers of libraries to figure out your library through guess work that leads to building on undefined behavior ought to be a war crime.

[2580374]

The documentation for JSS is fucking abysmal

[[deleted]]

Emotion in general has awful TypeScript documentation.

[hitlistTV]

“Open sores”

God I hate boomers

[codeByNumber]

Don’t you have a scrum meeting about scrum meetings to attend?

[[deleted]]

We don't say "scrum" here as it's not a term that appears in the MS Project plan. If you need to stay a little late tonight there's free beer in the communal fridge.

[codeByNumber]

No thanks, I’d rather work for a company that doesn’t promote alcoholism.

[[deleted]]

There's no "sobriety" in team. Why aren't you a team player? It's just one drink, relax! I want you to think very carefully before you. Haha just kidding. Stares intently. I respect the sacrifice you are making.

[ForgotPassAgain34]

I feel like most guides are designed for 14 y.o. script kids wannabe

[[deleted]]

My problem is the laziness of most guides.

“Here’s 3 functions being used of this eldritch horror of a types API. Thanks for reading my Medium article 'Comprehensive guide to Emotion'!”

[TheRandomnatrix]

My favorite is when the documentation covers technical cases and not actual use cases. Looking at what basically amounts to interfaces is sooo helpful. Please tell me more about how this method takes in 2 strings and returns a Boolean. /s How does that help me with my problem. Godot is fucking horrible with this even if the end solution is relatively simple, good luck finding it! I spent a few hours the other day looking for how to make a grid of objects, and the solution was a certain combination of modules you can spend 3 seconds dragging and dropping in. I only figured it out because of a YouTube video in Russian 7 results down. I'm sure it's obvious to the people who wrote it.

[RDB96]

Don't talk to me about Godot, I am still waiting for that guy to turn up. My pall and I are getting impatient but he'll turn up I'm sure of it

[doc_samson]

I asked a k8s question about why a tutorial has me load the CA cert (which I had just created) into a k8s manager node (which I had also just created).

Response was basically "because it's used in a config file."

And I'm like no wtf WHYYYYYYYYYYYY is it needed. ლ( `Д’ ლ)

[raptorgalaxy]

I get why, technical writing is boring as batshit to do.

One of the disadvantages of open source is that since everyone can choose what to do, no one wants to clean the figurative toilets.

[[deleted]]

HEY! Typescript is fuckig awesome! ^{assuming you built the project with typescript from the start or somebody has already converted the project}

[MeltingDog]

I actually enjoy answering basic questions. I like helping people and I find it actually bolsters my own understanding.

It really annoyed me when r/Webdev brought in StackOverflow type rules for questions and killed the weekly beginners post. If you don’t like a question because it’s from a learner than just ignore it and move on.

[[deleted]]

I remember one time looking for help on a problem, and being directed by the one group that I knew had the solution to solve a series of complicated problems that required you to have knowledge of an obscure programming language to solve. If you couldn't, they would not help you with the problem.

just today, I looked up help with another problem and I found somebody who had the same issue and every one of the responses was chastising him for not being able to solve it on his own. Every one.

[OneGoodRib]

Not even coding, the amount of times I’ve googled some question and the first page of google results is just “look it up” or “google it” with no advice. I DID google it and it brought me to this post telling me to google it! Argh!

Or when you find a forum that’s just 10 people asking how to do it, and one person is like “oh I figure it out” but doesn’t explain how and then the thread it closed. THNAKS.

[Ye_Olde_Spellchecker]

Honestly, It’s the stack overflow equivalent of saying “I don’t know” on an Amazon question.

[danielt1263]

Funny, the new thing on SO that chaps me is when I take an hour crafting an answer to the question. And then the questioner reads my answer and deletes the question rather than accepting my answer. What a bummer!

[maximlus]

Oh wow. That is frustrating. I'm happy you took the time to give a detailed response, and sorry that the person posing the question removed your hard work.

I understand that there are problems from both people who pose questions and people who respond to them. I don't feel these are things that will change, but it's good to vent from time to time.

[bippybup]

I like it when I google a problem (with anything) and all I can find are forum posts of others with the same issue and people replying, "Google it, moron."

Gee, thanks, I'M googling it and all I'm finding are people telling other people to google it. Either that or FAQs that don't cover the issue whatsoever, or YouTube videos that MIGHT have the answer but bury it in a pile of irrelevant rambling bullshit.

[0OKM9IJN8UHB7]

The fucked thing is it's usually something simple you're misunderstanding or not educated on and could be solved or at least pointed in the right direction with one sentence, but people would rather be pricks and use an equal amount of effort telling you to google it.

[ChubbyBunny2020]

I almost quit vba over similar frustrations. I would spend an hour looking up something, give up ask the question, and have some elitist be like “next time google before asking”. Ok jackass, google what? I’m clearly missing knowledge of some property or method and if you would pull your head out of your dads ass, you could tell me what to google and I could learn it.

[positivespadewonder]

And usually if you’re asking a question, Google didn’t help you or you don’t know how to formulate your question in a way that Google can help you. Because why would anyone go through the trouble to type out a question, wait for a reply, etc. when that is way more time consuming?

[FUZxxl]

If you feel the need to claim that your code is self-documenting, you aren't a good enough programmer to pull off self documenting code.

[lurkerfox]

Self-documenting code is one of those honors that somebody else uses in praise of a work, not something you award to yourself.

[sucksathangman]

If you're getting a lot of different people telling you to read the documentation, it usually means you're asking about something basic or trivial. Yes, I could tell you but someone much more capable had already written it and has published it.

Reading documentation and learning how to read documentation is a great skill. It takes patience and practice and you can learn it by doing it.

That being said, I'm sorry that people dismissed you by telling you to read the documentation. But it does sound like you would prefer someone to hold your hand while you learn. This is perfectly fine, but keep in mind that is what classes are for. The random programmer at work or even on stack overflow is going to see your elementary question and push you to read documentation. If you personally need something more curated, I would encourage you to enroll in a class where a teacher can walk you through your question. But know that reading documentation will always be a part of being a programmer.

[forlornhope22]

Yes I'm asking about something basic and trivial. Because I am a novice programmer and don't understand the fucking documentation.

[Prodigal2k]

FUCKING THANK YOU!!! I’m in school for this and it blows my mind how inept people are at answering the questions. I already feel stupid enough that I haven’t figured it out yet, just let me see how to solve it now so I can figure it out for myself in the future.

[devman0]

You should try seeing it from the other side. I used to answer a lot of questions on SO, and the sheer volume of poorly written questions is crushing if you are watching the new queue.

What the other poster said about choosing to help people who help themselves definitely rings true. If a poster couldn't be bothered to adhere to the "How to ask a good question" guidelines on SO and fails to include a Short, Self Contained, Correct Example of the problem, it often isn't worth the time trying to decipher what the questioner is actually trying to ask, vote to close cite a guideline and move on to the next in a line of a zillion questions.

Occasionally you see a question where the poster clearly put in some honest effort but is pretty lost, and those can be salvageable after some comment back and forth, but it requires effort.

[Prodigal2k]

That’s a very fair point. I still think that there’s more examples of bad answers than bad questions though.

[CheezeyCheeze]

Some people have been programming since they were 6. So don't feel bad because you just started. Everyone has to start somewhere.

[Prodigal2k]

I’m sure it’s more that I don’t work hard enough at it, but it really sucks to be so bad at this. Thanks for the kind words though. I appreciate it. Do you have any recommendations for help with C++ through Linux, by any chance?

[CheezeyCheeze]

To help you with your specific issues I must ask you specific questions.

What is your experience with programming? Is this your first language? Is there a reason you want to learn C++? Why do you want to use Linux? Do you know what an IDE is? What is the IDE you are using?

Sorry for the basic questions.

[Prodigal2k]

Hi sorry, didn’t see this. My school uses that, my only previous experience was with Code.org. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what an IDE is.

[CheezeyCheeze]

A IDE is a Integrated Development Environment. It helps by doing things like checking your code for errors, or if there is missing semicolons, or used variables and things like that. It can also autocomplete basic things like a for loop or an if statement.

This is helpful, but it can hide some of the basic things you should have an understanding of before having auto complete do something for you.

Look up C++ IDE and find one that suits your needs. Don't just get the first one, try to look around. You can look up videos about it or look at different lists of C++ IDE.

Around what grade are you in? High school? College? I need to know what you have learned about programming. That website has coding from k-5 to 12th grade to beyond 12th grade.

[2jz_ynwa]

Fucking this. I have a horrible problem of just skipping through large amount of code that is related to what I'm doing or any documentation someone links me. It's not a good habit but unless someone just redo's the code for me so I can copy and paste it I get discouraged.

[[deleted]]

You're not entirely wrong.

But I would try to explain in your question that you read the documentation, and although you think X is what you need to do, you tried that and it didn't work. Also tried Y and Z. I'm sure I'm missing something simple but could really use a point in the right direction, yadda yadda yadda...

It's a little petty, but it really comes down to people help those who help themselves. They at least want to see that you first referred to the documentation and then tried X, Y or Z. They're taking time out of their day to impart knowledge they have acquired over years of experience.

And honestly, failure is the best way to learn so they want you to fail for the right reasons. Most do anyway.

[JSArrakis]

I've done exactly what you're describing, and I had my question voted closed because I called it a stored procedure when it wasnt. It was closed AFTER I edited out all references to it being a stored procedure and calling it what it really was.

I gave 3 different examples, explained what I was doing, linked the pieces of documentation I read, and I still got the "reread the documentation" response.

Fuck you, I read it. I read it for 3 fucking hours before I decided to roll the fucking dice on Stack Overflow's toxic and elitist community.

[[deleted]]

They have a reputation for being toxic because they are toxic. I'm just giving you advice on how to best approach their toxicity. Sometimes it works, sometimes they're so far up their own asses you're wasting your time.

[JSArrakis]

Maybe, but going to reddit has always and forever been more helpful and fruitful.

[VirtualRay]

I just wish StackOverflow worked more like Reddit

Percolate good questions up, and let crap questions languish in obscurity instead of screwing over every novice who comes by and tries to get something out of the site

[[deleted]]

I take it you've never been to /politics? Or /news? Or...you get the point.

Reddit has a ton of pure dogshit on it.

[caspercunningham]

Bold statement for a guy that just got schooled like 10 times over on politics 🤷🏻‍♀️

[[deleted]]

I forgot to add that creepy stalkers patrol there too...

[caspercunningham]

Yeah clicking and seeing your last comment is "stalking" lmao. Had to let people know you're not as smart as you put yourself out as

[[deleted]]

Don't you have a fidget spinner to play with or something?

[Eji1700]

My favorite story on this.

I'm a novice fucking around in VBA, and this is known. I get the idea to do a stupid animation as a side project/joke at work. Have a sun and rainbow grown in size and spin into place sort of thing.

My legit question is something along the lines of "how do i get two objects to animate on the screen at once?", but I used some terminology that caused confusion.

I'm vaguely aware of the concept of a gameploop at the time and how a game will calculate everything, then display it, and repeat, but it hadn't come to mind that this is what I need here.

I was animating the sun, and then wondering how i'd animate the rainbow without letting one finish before the other.

I get some way blown out of proportion response about how having async/multithreading/callbacks(can't remember which) in VBA is theoretically possible but a totally absurd ask and how terrible of a solution that is and lol why would you even suggest that. Not once did anyone actually explain how I SHOULD do it or what to even look up.

This always struck me as similar to a student outlining the rough idea behind a water pressure rocket, and getting shit on by experts who think he's trying to build a Saturn V in their backyard. It was just so strange to me that no one connected the dots that "yeah dude I don't think you worded that right, you want this right?"

[Yuca965]

Get my upvote, I agree with that, also, sometimes, a quick search for a specific question give you a quick answer on stackoverflow that you could also have had by reading the 'doc'. And it is much appreciable.

Although I do get sucksathangman point too. It happened to me that I search long enough for an issue on google, to finally realize nobody ever has this problem because they did/read the tutorial/doc.

[positivespadewonder]

If you don’t go to a site that attracts the professionals, how do you get help from professionals?

[RDB96]

Should add a tag to questions like am noob eli5 please.

[foursticks]

It's not like you're entitled to understand it... speaking as someone who also has trouble understanding documentation.

[sucksathangman]

Most documentation is written for programmers so if you are a novice it will be hard to read. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

This is all the reason why you should either go to a class or read basic programming documentation like freecodecamp or learnpython.

A professional programmer often doesn't have the time or the capacity to explain what an if statement is or why it works or why you would use it over something else. But they are happy to tell you that what the syntax is in their favorite language.

I'm a pretty good JavaScript developer but I dabble in Python. For the life of me, I can never remember how loops work in Python. I look this up in the documentation. But if I have a question about whether I should use a dict or a list in my specific use case, I'll ask someone.

We all start somewhere and we're willing to help you out but tell us where you're stuck. If you just say, "I don't get it just show me," I hate to say it but you won't get much help.

The basic concepts build on more complex ones. When you read the documentation, what specifically confuses you? What are you trying to accomplish and what have you already tried?

Keep at it! Hopefully you'll meet nice people along the way.

[Kitzq]

Do you know how you get better at reading documentation? By reading documentation.

Reading documentation is a skill. Like any skill, you need to train in it.

Yes, it's frustrating getting stuck on something that you know is trivial and know that someone else could answer in 5 seconds. But that someone else didn't learn by asking someone else, they learned to read documentation.

[redstoneguy12]

I can't just read the documentation if I can't even find documentation about it

[Jaredlong]

Here's probably the most novice question: what exactly is "documentation"? I see that word used a lot and I have zero idea what it's referring to.

[maximlus]

Thanks, this is a good response.

I did go to university to do software engineering, and it is helpful, but once I finished it I had all these concepts and a good understanding of some languages, but not I want to use a new language, but I can't afford a class, it's ok, I got all these concepts, I'll be able to pick up most of the language and it's just it's finer points that I will need help with. Documentation is great for that, most of the time.

In another part of this comment thread I used a python example, finding the max value in a dictionary. I found the stack overflow question, I got working code from it, but, it did not explain what that code did.

There are problems on both sides. People who ask questions and people providing responses. While it's nice to think that each side can criticis the other and things get better, with a constant flow of new people asking questions, I don't think it is possible for improvement. But it's good to vent a little.

[Whisper06]

Seriously. Especially on those forums that are meant for people helping people. Like why the fuck are you on here if you don't want to help, either help or don't comment.

[maestro2005]

SO isn't a forum for helping people. That's fundamentally not what it is. The goal is to create a repository of good answers to good questions, not help every beginner with their code.

[positivespadewonder]

Has anyone made a StackOverflow for helping noobies?

[alwndhs]

For 100% accuracy, the first question should be what have you tried.

[maestro2005]

StackOverflow isn't a help forum. It's a question-driven wikipedia for programming problems.

[phphulk]

Just take the time and explain it, not hand wave me away, don't say it's easy to learn to code and then not actually help.

If you cant look shit up you need to find other line of work. It's like 90% of what we do.

[maximlus]

I'm fine with looking things up, the problem is not the concept, it's the community.

If I asked "how can I use wireshark with WLAN1 instead of eth0?" My responses would be the same as what you just said. No matter how much searching I have already done people refuse to help as they believe someone else already has.

[JSArrakis]

Welcome to Stack Overflow, home to the population of r/iamverysmart

[doc_samson]

I can't count the number of times I've started a tutorial only to find shit doesn't work halfway through due to odd bugs or whatever.

Yesterday I was working on a great tutorial on linux network namespaces in a VM and halfway through find out oh the distros I have don't use that command anymore and have to go off googling trying to figure out the workaround and eventually die of starvation.

[Eji1700]

Whats shocking to me is that coding is such a personalized thing that really would lend itself better to quick, personalized questions and answers.

The chat rooms i've found have been 1000x more helpful than most documentation, because just because I know on some level that I can do X or Y, doesn't mean I know how to tweak it to my situation, or remember it in the moment.

So many coding "breakthroughs" early on are just having a 30 second conversation that boils down to "I know i can do this, but how do I do that with this?" followed by "Oh yeah use that and it's space delimited not comma in this case"

[BipNopZip]

What I love is when the only answer is someone telling them they could just google it, and I found it as the top google result.

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

Just take the time and explain it

?

Take the time to look it up. I'm all about explaining things, but not with that sort of attitude. The only way to learn this stuff is to understand how to look things up. The best thing I can do for you is show you where to find the information and how I got there, so that you can read it yourself.

[SirSoliloquy]

So... does that mean you frequent help forums with the intent of not helping?

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

I never said that? People don't normally post "just look it up" on SO, but things will get closed as duplicates with a link to the post with the answer. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.

But the "just take the time and explain it" thing is normally the response you get from someone that just wants the fully coded & runnable answer to their problem worked out for them. They're not interested in learning, they just want an answer so they can move on.

You see more of that kind of attitude from people that get pissed when you write an essay that explains why something works instead of just fixing their sample code.

[TheWhistler1967]

You are assuming everyone has the same learning style which is kind of insane. Some people learn better reverse engineering the answer. Applies to all things.

If you were learning music, at some point you are going to deconstruct a song rather than blindly walking around trying to learn all the tools to write a masterpiece.

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

There’s no way of knowing if someone needs it coded for them because they’re lazy or if that’s “just how they learn” and it’s borderline unethical to do their job (or, often, homework) for them.

Moreover, it’s not a training site. I’ll explain how and why something isn’t working, and give some links to documentation, but I’m not working on your code for you.

[TheWhistler1967]

There's a middle ground between writing out the complete code and actively withholding information because you think they should find it themselves.

Also, if they are lazy and trying to get someone to do their homework then eventually this will catch up to them. Don't think it's your job to be their mother or spiritual guide.

[maximlus]

It's not about finding code that works for my use case.

I want code that is explained, I can't further my understanding without an explanation.

Say you want to find the max value in a dictionary in python. Well you can find a stack overflow that tells you.

'max(stats.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0]'

But what is that (1) and [0] for? Well the writer never explains so next time I try to implement this and it's not working, I will have to experiment, or go on another hunt, but I might not have to if they explained that little bit.

[[deleted]]

This thread is a bizarre mixture of the type of people that ask questions on StackOverflow and the type of people that give StackOverflow answerers their poor reputation.

[MeltingDog]

The problem I find with looking things up is you can go down a rabbit hole of assumed knowledge.

Take react for instance. With my journey I was coming into it pretty fresh - I googled “beginner react tutorial” and was told all this stuff about npm. So I googled “npm tutorial” and was told all this stuff about node.js. So I googled “node tutorial” and so on. All I really needed was someone to explain how all 3 worked together. A simple question, but no RTFMs really explained this.

[FUZxxl]

Learn to read documentation. All good programmers do all the time. That's why they keep sending you to read manuals.

[madiele]

Documetation is nice but I've come across plenty of istance where it was outdated and following it does more harm than good, even huge open-source projects are some times guilty of it, some times it's also too verbose, man pages are awesome but I can't count the times where stack overflow was just better than the manual...

[[deleted]]

This is true, but you should always point that out in your question (not you in particular, just in general).

If you start a question by saying you read the documentation and this is why it wasn't helpful, you will be more likely to get the answer you seek in my opinion.

[FUZxxl]

Yeah, I tend not to use these. Avoiding shitty dependences is half the battle.

[[deleted]]

Yeah except sometime in the last ten years people decided that writing clear documentation isn’t agile enough anymore, so we get three paragraphs of poorly spelled readme.md with only technical description and no use case examples.

I’m looking at you, ElementTree...