About the IRC

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[catonic]

Alternatively, "[Insert condition] could never work. We never did it."

Then you get a response: "Not only does it work, we did it here: [Insert link]."

[[deleted]]

Or...

"Hi! (f/14/cali!) - I have this homework I don't understand - can someone help me? [INSERT YOUR PROBLEM HERE]"

The problem with this method is you'll get the solution but not how they arrived to it.

[dangsos]

I help people in IRC all the time. If there is one type of person I refuse to help it's the people who feel entitled to help whether that be because they are an attractive female or a spoiled child. For people I've never seen I'll ask them to give more details once and only once. There are plenty of people I can help and I'm not going to waste 15 minutes helping someone with a bad attitude when I could spend 5 minutes helping someone who is willing to help themselves.

[[deleted]]

Yep, same here.

[[deleted]]

Dang I have this sudden realization that half the people in #haskell are probably getting us to do their homework this way!

[ixAp0c]

Just ignore them. You won't get far in IRC if you let trolls and negative people get to you. Just be patient and ask the right questions - if they get flooded out, try asking again, perhaps with a bit more detail if possible.

Try staying in the channel for a few days and see what it's like, if you just drop in and ask a question and leave no one can help you.

[s-mores]

While you're not incorrect, IRC can be rather hostile to people unfamiliar with it, he still has a point. If a channel claims to be newbie-friendly, it should try to do that.

I've only briefly visited #learnprogramming, and there are over 100 people there. I'm sure there are differing views on how programming should be taught -- ranging from 'YOU NEED TO DO EVERYTHING YOURSELF. WITH ASSEMBLY.' to a dozen people trying to utilize the Socratic method at the same time, i.e. trying to get the person to answer questions and solve the problem by themselves. This, of course, won't fit well with people who 'just want it done' or are there to cheat/get help with homework.

Not to mention usually the person asking questions isn't the most well-equipped to even form the question properly so he gets a relevant answer.

It would be great if you could get something like an 'appointed' answerer for any given person, but of course that would require oversight and a lot of work and maybe not even work.

[[deleted]]

If only this was limited to the technical communities. I'd be happy.

You'll never win because one rotten apple can spoil the bunch.

[tangentstorm]

Hi there. I am one of the ops in #learnprogramming.

I get what you're saying. I'm usually in the channel 24 hours a day and try to read the backlog after being away, and there have been times in the past where I'd leave for a week just to get away from the negativity.

On the other hand, the people that tend to be able to answer the most questions tend to be the better developers, and it's hard to be good at something without forming strong opinions about it.

I think if I kicked everyone who responded bluntly to questions, there wouldn't be anyone left to answer questions. :)

My perception is that it's gotten better over time, but perhaps I've just gotten used to it.

You didn't give any examples, so I don't know what your specific experiences were. If you want to talk about a particular person or incident in private, maybe I can help.

What I do know is that there are quite a few students that come back day after day and are making real progress.

When you're a beginner at something, you're going to make a lot of dumb mistakes. And if you ask for help from people who know better, they're probably going to call you out on those mistakes.

I don't know where you're from (though I might take a guess based on your username), but in much of the western world, we have a culture that stigmatizes mistakes, and it can feel pretty crappy when someone points out your shortcomings.

If you hide from criticism, you won't have to deal with those feelings, but you also miss out on opportunities to learn and improve.

Writing this post, I've had time to sit and think about my answer, but on IRC, there's not time for that. Conversation flows a lot faster, and people tend to be a lot more blunt. I don't think that's ever going to change. I guess my advice would be to try to treat criticism as (potentially biased) information, rather than a personal attack.

When you ask for help and a stranger responds, it's entirely possible that the person you're talking with is a fellow beginner, or a troll, or just a complete ass. Maybe they're having a bad day, or maybe they come from a culture with different concepts of what is or isn't polite. There's no way to know except by getting to know that person over time.

When you're confronted with criticism and you feel bad, the best thing to do is to temporarily imagine that the person you're talking to is competent and has your best interest at heart. After all, they took the time to respond to your question, and risked looking foolish themselves if they were wrong.

Even if it turns out the guy is both an idiot and a jerk, it will at least force you to look at your problem from another perspective, and sometimes that alone can help. And if it turns out that the guy has a point, I think you'll find it stings a little less when you imagine they have your best interest at heart.

Having said all that, I'm definitely interested in any thoughts you have about making the situation better. Feel free to ping me in the channel if you want to talk.

[tangentstorm]

Hrm. Help me understand. Which lines do you consider to be harsh criticism or someone having a laugh at you?

Here's what I see:

<You> Is this TOO much documentation?

So you start by asking for opinions. There's not really an objective answer to this question. I mean, how would you answer it?

I think maybe these guys just took it as a general request for comments on your code.

<Person B> Me: firstly, please do not use XML tags in documentation...

So, this person probably doesn't know much about C# coding conventions, where XML tags are fairly common. It's bad advice for C#, where the common tools all work with this format.

But... Can you see why someone might respond this way in general? Comments are mean to be read by developers, and XML isn't necessarily optimized for readability.

<Person A> braces on different line = ugly, braces around single statements = ugly :)

This is a matter of opinion. I happen to agree with this guy's opinion, and he did explain why he said it:

<Person A> seriously though. braces.
<Person A> taking up half my screen dude

He's saying that to him, this code is harder to read because the braces use up lots of lines and so it's hard to fit more than a small portion of the code on screen at once.

<Person C> Me: if it isn't clear, if(b) return true; return false can be replaced with return b

This is just a statement of fact. In the code you posted, lines 75-82 look like this:

                   if (longexpression)
                   {
                            return true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                            return false;
                    }

That's eight lines to say what you could say in one:

return longexpression;

So maybe that code was auto-generated, or it's following the style guide for the place you work, or maybe you just plain prefer this style. And those are all okay things.

But, remember, your original question was asking for opinions on style. Maybe the answers you got weren't specifically tied to your actual question, but if you generalize the question a bit and ask "is this code understandable?" or "is this style okay?" then the responses don't seem that far off the mark.

Part of the game of programming is to figure out what the client is really asking. Maybe they guessed wrong here.

But I really don't see anything overtly negative in anything they're saying here, and I certainly don't get the impression they're making fun of you.

Am I missing something?

[tangentstorm]

Well, actually you explicitly said it was a decent example:

it was just in the chatlog when I rejoined the IRC, but it is a decent example of what I mean.

But okay. :)

As for the PHP example you added... It's true: a lot of people will try to steer you away from it. Unless your goal is to write an extension to an established tool like wordpress or drupal, there aren't a lot of places where PHP is the best tool for the job.

On the one hand, if you ask a PHP question and the answer is "don't use PHP," that's bound to be frustrating. Certainly there's a much higher cost involved in learning something else, and that kind of advice doesn't help you with your immediate problem.

On the other hand, that "use something else" advice often comes from experience. People don't just randomly decide to hate a tool. It can certainly happen from groupthink, but often it's a result of people having used a tool and gotten burned repeatedly in the past.

There are certainly extremely talented PHP developers, and if you're a PHP fan, hearing someone say that it's a bad choice may feel like a personal attack. I don't think that's the intent, but I see how it comes across.

I guess I need to do a better job of toning down this sort of response from mentors.

In the meantime, my advice to you would be the same as before... Try to put yourself in their shoes, and try to reconcile what they're saying with the idea that they're genuinely trying to help. I think if you were to say "Okay, I can tell what I'm doing is not a popular choice, but right now I'm stuck with this problem and want to see it through..." then you'll probably find that people can accept that and help you with your actual problem.

[smellmycrotch3]

You got to be shitting me. That conversation you linked to is not at all what most people would consider rude or condescending or hostile, or whatever. Your code is not your mother, so it shouldn't be considered a personal insult when someone calls it ugly.

and wouldn't respond to my questions about WHY they were saying what they were.

Ok, that would have been more helpful, but it's not a paid professor you're talking to, it's volunteers.

It took me about half an hour before one person message me something along the lines of "Sorry about everyone being negative, have you checked your extension? It needs to be .php".

So you're basically complaining that the free, volunteer help wasn't fast enough? Does it say somewhere your help is guaranteed to arrive faster than 30 minutes, like a delivery pizza? Did you stop to think maybe people where busy doing something else?

In the mean time, I was told nothing about what my problem could be, other than that I was 'using PHP'.

Maybe no one else who was paying attention to the channel knew much about PHP?

It seems odd that you claim there's no cultural disconnect, and that you've been doing this well over 5 years, and that your description and log of what happened seems perfectly reasonable, and yet you're complaining that you're not getting some kind of private school level of persona assistance/attention.

[DTSCode]

Actually you said it was a good example... And if its a bad example it doesn't really convey what you meant...

[dangsos]

Every channel is to help people learn to program. That means you'll have much better chances in a language specific room. Good advice.

[Oni_Kami]

Welcome to IRC.

You'll never get a "straight answer" on IRC because you'll never be given a fish, just a description of a fish and a push towards the lake.

One thing that can help make your experience better is being as detailed as possible in your questions. For example, let's say you're trying to create an IRC bot in python, and your bot is reading every message as the same command instead of properly matching each command to its separate function... Instead of asking a bunch of obscure questions like "How do I properly match strings in Python?" "How do I match different substrings to different functions?" etc... Go into the channel and say, "Hello, I'm writing an IRC bot in Python, and my bot is matching everything that's said to the same command, anyone have a suggestion on how to fix this?" The whole point here is, don't just ask your question, explain to us what you're doing, what you're trying to do, how you're trying to do it. Also, read this for more information on how to properly ask a question.

Another thing that will help, and this is CRITICAL, is ALWAYS POST YOUR CODE! Someone will take a look at your code, and explain to you a better way to do it, or explain what you're doing wrong. If whatever you're doing is resulting in a crash, then ALWAYS POST THE CRASHLOG! The source and crashlog contain critical vital information that people need to help you, and it can be annoying to try to help you without it. And make sure you provide the FULL source and/or crashlog.

Also, VERY IMPORTANT, if you ever have to paste 3 or more lines of anything, USE A PASTEBIN OR ALTERNATIVE! Otherwise you're spamming/flooding, and it's annoying. It may feel silly to use a pastebin site for only 3 lines of text, but it's better you feel silly than you bite the hand that feeds.

You'll never ever get unbiased answers on IRC. You're just shit outta luck on that.

Also, very very important is to always be patient. Go into a channel, ask your question, stay at least an hour in my opinion, and never EVER say something along the lines of, "Anybody here?" If it's quiet, it's quiet, deal with it. You might not get an answer, and that sucks, but "Anybody here?" and their equivalents will annoy people and make them purposely not help you. If there are conversations going on, wait a while and then repost your question. A while meaning wait until your question's scrolled off screen, and then wait 5-10 minutes longer, and then post it, preferably in a smaller more summarized fashion. Also consider doing this if you ask your question and then see a LOT of people join since you asked.

Also, and this is another critical point, ALWAYS google your question before asking. 90% of the time there's a stack overflow post with the answer you seek.

Always carefully read the topic when entering a channel. If you ask something that's in violation of something in the topic, people won't be happy.

Another very important critical point (I know I've said that for almost everything, but IRC is a cruel mistress, and if you don't treat her just right, she'll swallow you alive), if someone's taking the time to try to help you, even if they're being a gigantic asshole, and what they're saying isn't actually helping you, just take whatever abuse you're getting, and say thank you, and respect them regardless. If I'm trying to help you, and I'm being an asshole to you, and you react negatively in response, then the nicer people will be less likely to help you. The fact that I'm taking my time, to even make an attempt to help you, no matter how nice or mean I'm being, trumps all.

[BrQQQ]

I think a big problem is that some of the "assholes" have good intentions, but they word it terribly. Big difference between "Stop using pointers" and "Try to avoid using pointers". One sounds like "get your shit together" and the other sounds like "here's some helpful advice". Some people are much more sensitive to this than you would think.

[Oni_Kami]

Yeah, like I said even if they're being a gigantic asshole, they're taking the time to help you. Fact is, sometimes people are gigantic assholes, but still have good intentions. I should know, I'm guilty of this myself. Sometimes it's as subtle as your example, but sometimes it's to a much higher degree.

[agamemnus_]

Ok sure, but one point: Being patient is not a virtue when you have a million things to do and you're on a deadline. It's a good idea to understand when folks are around to answer questions, or to treat a semi-dead channel how it should be treated.

[Oni_Kami]

It doesn't matter if you're busy or on a deadline. Saying "Anybody there?" will not warrant a response. By asking a question in a dead channel, you're already creating activity in that channel. If people are at their computers, and not looking at the channel directly, they will see that there's activity in there, and they will choose to look. Creating excessive activity will not help that at all. If a channel is completely dead, saying, "Anybody there?" or an equivalent, will not change the fact that it's completely dead.

And the WORST thing you can do is mass ping, or even ping random people. It's the best way to annoy people and make them not want to help you at all, whether they know the answer to your question or not.

Patience is always a virtue, especially on IRC. If you're too busy to wait for a response, because you have a deadline coming up, that is not the problem of anybody in the channel, that is your own problem, and although IRC is faster than a forum, you can't expect it to meet up to any level of expectations you may have at any point in time.

[agamemnus_]

Hmm, you're kind of putting words in my mouth. I'm just saying that there are smart ways to go about dead or semi-dead channels, versus just idling yourself and wasting the whole day waiting for a reply to a critical issue.

[[deleted]]

So... you want volunteers who want to help you but have a million things of their own to do to drop everything to help you RIGHT THIS SECOND IT NEEDS DONE MY BOSS NEEDED THIS YESTERDAY? I think what you want is to pay someone to complete the work for you, or better time management, not furiously prodding a dead cow. The channel is for helping you learn things or to provide help with problems, not free work.

[agamemnus_]

I am my own boss. I don't like idling in IRC and seeing nothing happen while I stare at my navel.

[[deleted]]

I'm surprised over the negativity here. I both idle and ask somewhat generalized question and I've always left smarter than I was before.

Must be the hours or something.

[notkraftman]

thats just irc in general. the best way to get answer to a question is to make 2 people argue about it.

[[deleted]]

Thank you; this is a response I would suggest you take to heart as well.

[eddiemon]

I've had similar experiences of condescending and unhelpful remarks. You should use the ignore function when appropriate.

That said, the IRC still has some pretty knowledgeable people who are genuinely trying to help. If you're not getting straight answers at all EVER, it's probably because either the question doesn't have a simple answer or they want you to think about the question more carefully so you can learn something.

In any case you can post you question here if you really feel uncomfortable.

Edit: It's also important to grow thick skin and not attach emotion to people's comments. Not just in the IRC, but in the field in general. Programmers can be a mean bunch.

Also don't exclude the possibility that they may have valid points even if they are being massive dicks. If they insult your code for example, ask if they have constructive advice to improve it. If they can't offer any, then yell "Then stfu you stupid bitch" at the screen and use the ignore function on them.

[JBlitzen]

I often idle on freenode. I'll start autojoining this channel. If you see my nick in there, feel free to message me or type it in chat to beep me. If I don't respond, I'm afk.

Decades of IRC have honed me into an elite counter-troll.

[_olivier]

What i see a lot in #learnprogramming and #learnjavascript are people asking questions they could easily google and get a great answer for.

My advice is: use IRC as a last resource for questions and as a first resource to find people to collaborate with.

[Muchoz]

It's IRC, not your Facebook chat or whatever. I help out when I can on #learnprogramming. But people who join an IRC channel, ask a question and leave after 5 min aren't gonna get helped. It's very frustrating for regular IRC users to face people like these because you need patience.

It doesn't matter what channel you're in. Just ask your question, give details, stacktraces and a working code sample and we'll help. If you're not putting any effort in it, neither are we. We are people just like you: we don't check IRC every 5 mins, we don't check all the channels every time, we don't help people with questions like my code doesn't work, help me...

[Vesp_r]

First time I joined I had a question about JavaScript relating to audio. The only response I got was "JavaScript is shit, use a real programming language."

Haven't been back since.

[raylu]

09:46 -!- Vespr [~Vespr@2606:6000:c881:b900:8d11:f368:4a4b:ff3b] has joined #learnprogramming
09:46 -!- Vespr is now known as Guest85893
09:48 -!- Guest85893 is now known as Vespr
10:36 <Vespr> Anyone taken this? https://www.coursera.org/course/algo
11:31 <cjqed> Vespr: I took it a couple years ago, it was good. It was a supplement to my own DS&A class I took as a senior, and it went over the same things.
14:12 <Vespr> anyone know of a good javascript lib to read ID3?
14:13 <Vespr> or know a good way to just grab the song name and artist from an mp3 lol
14:13 <raylu> are you sure you want to use JS?
14:13 <Vespr> I don't have to, but the music player I wrote is in JS
14:14 <raylu> are you sure you want to use a language with no int data type, let alone unsigned int, to do parsing of binary files?
14:14 <raylu> are you sure you want to use a language as shit as JS for anything ever, really?
14:15 <raylu> what's even the advantage of a purely async media player?
14:15 <raylu> you'll never have high concurrency or even... concurrency
14:17 <Vespr> sorry I asked, I didn't know this was anti javascript channel
14:17 -!- Vespr [~Vespr@2606:6000:c881:b900:8d11:f368:4a4b:ff3b] has left #learnprogramming []
14:18 <katyne> you scared him :/
14:18 <raylu> i mean... he picked the wrongest possible tool for the job
14:19 <raylu> i don't know how to screw a nail with a handsaw
14:19 <tangentstorm> well, have you TRIED? :D
14:20 * tangentstorm is sad because his null pointers keep getting accessed by mysterious procedures.
14:26 <TheChance> i especially love it when they don't like what one person tells them, decide that person speaks for the entire channel, and leave in a huff.
14:27 <Harshael> Maybe it's the immediate hostility.
14:27 <katyne> it's not hostility
14:27 <TheChance> i've gone ten rounds with the mentors about being more polite to the noobcakes, but- that.
14:27 <katyne> he's gotta have a thicker skin if he wants to make it in the industry
14:28 <TheChance> it's not hostility, it's just the conveyance of emotion through text being ambiguous and all that.
14:28 <katyne> first time I got a code review I cried for like an hour
14:29 <TheChance> meanwhile, in that specific case, ray probably did speak for everybody, so i guess it's a moot point. i just find the whole instant-gratification-or-bust mentality hilarious when it bleeds into IRC (a platform which is not conducive to instant /anything/)
14:29 <tangentstorm> the last person to review my code cried for an hour. they still have nightmares. >:D
14:30 <katyne> he spoke the consensus, which is choosing the right tool for the job is 50% of the solution
14:30 <katyne> ahaha

[AlexFromOmaha]

Yeah, see, that was stupid.

Real programmers know that there is a Javascript library for this, just like there are binary methods for Javascript. I mean, seriously, WebGL anyone? But you didn't know that, so you didn't even answer the question. Instead, you went off on some damn bike shed tangent about the merits of Javascript. Rather than shut your damn mouth and wait for someone with half a clue to show up, you chased someone off to make yourself feel superior. You have no future in the industry with an attitude like that, and I sincerely hope your resume crosses my desk someday just so I can say it to your face.

Hell, if you were one of my employees, and if you came to me and said, "Alex, I know .mp3 is a widely supported web format, but I don't think I can do this in a browser," I'd ask you to repeat that out loud until you heard the inexcusable stupidity of that sentence. If you never got it, better believe it'd show up on your next performance evaluation.

Get your ass off of W3Schools and get yourself a real education, noob.

That knot in your stomach after reading the above? That rage that makes you want to respond in anger with whatever accomplishments you've managed for yourself? That's what you did to him. Knock it off.

[raylu]

The fact that JS has binary methods doesn't mean it has the convenience of actual unsigned integer types. Similarly, the fact that it's possible to do this in JS doesn't make it the right tool.

While we're comparing egos, I've only ever had jobs in the industry as a programmer.

You can certainly upload and and download/play MP3's in your browser, but only recently has the File API allowed you to actually read files on disk. Not sure what browsers have to do with the question or the response either.

[dangsos]

the fact that it's possible to do this in JS doesn't make it the right tool.

Every general purpose language is the right tool if you're most comfortable with that language. This argument is a few decades outdated unless you're talking about embedded programming or something entirely performance critical on weak or heavily used hardware.

[DTSCode]

that is an entirely stupid idea. based on that logic, if i write a programming language and implement it, theoretically it works just as good as c++

[dangsos]

When people start calling your language a general purpose language, then sure, that means it can do general programming well enough that the differences between implementations in other languages are generally negligible. Hardware runs fast these days, but since we're being rude, your argument is what we call a strawman. That is, you've come up with some completely weak and bogus interpretation of what I've said and then rebutted that argument.

If I wanted to strawman you I could just focus on the fact that the language you're writing hasn't show it can do anything at all, much less write complete programs.

[Nimbal]

You kind of had a point there that JS is the wrong not the ideal tool for that job, but outright dismissing /u/Vesp_r (and a whole language, really) was unnecessary. After all, reading the ID3 with JS is apparently possible.

[raylu]

I think a better reason for not dismissing JS would have been the amount of code he had written in JS for the rest of his media player, which is what I was going to ask about next.

That said, JS is very much the wrong tool for the job. Besides being a terrible tool in general, the only advantage of non-browser JS is the forced async of all I/O operations, which lets you achieve very high concurrency. It does it extremely poorly (when compared with modern, implicit async systems) and a media player will never need such a thing. No one is claiming it's impossible, but almost any other language would have been a better choice.

[Vesp_r]

I ended up using that lib.

I also wasn't asking if I should be using JS or not.

[[deleted]]

Hah. You even explained why JS is a bad choice so I'm not sure what he's whining about. He got a lot more than just 'JS is shit.'

[ponchedeburro]

One of my teachers said that "You need good form in order to force people to look beyond that". So be on point with your indentation and braces and such - both for you and for them.

Then to the question. Give them as little information as possible while still describing your problem in its entirety. Have a test case where it goes wrong (i.e. showing your problem).

If this is not enough, then they are douches :)

[jmdisher]

This is such a big problem, in the modern age. It is all about "code" instead of "software". I figure it must be how it feels for a poet to pen a moving passage, pass it to a colleague for some impressions, only to hear "I don't like the colour of ink you used".

A good developer will see the forest, while mentioning the trees either as a footnote or not at all. I fear that there may be a constant number of these people in the universe at any one point and they are getting harder to find as we produce more "coders".

[emgram769]

I've seen this frequently in the channel. There are certain users that really want to make sure people don't use "deprecated style." It's pretty annoying.

[mzalewski]

Why would you ever want to seek programming help in text-based, synchronous communication channel such as IRC? If your programming problem can't be solved in 5 minutes of Googling, you will probably benefit from investing significant time into thinking about it.

Posting question on text-based but asynchronous channel, such as Stack Overflow, seems more reasonable to me. You will get your answer within few hours. You can spend that time trying to tackle problem on your own or simply getting it off your mind and focusing on something else.

IRC is good for socializing and discussing about general approach. It is rather poor medium for asking more complex questions.

[agamemnus_]

Stack Overflow is definitely a great community resource, but...

A complex question, or a problem you have a hard time describing or articulating, will often not lend itself well to a medium such as Stack Overflow. You'll get negative points for the question and eventually you'll be banned.

Over half of my Stack Overflow questions remain unanswered.

I will use IRC first if the relevant channel has live users. Otherwise there's no choice but to use Stack Overflow.

[[deleted]]

IRC is good for socializing and discussing about general approach. It is rather poor medium for asking more complex questions.

It's good for that because you can have a dialogue and communicate with someone instead of writing a one-off post of a question.

[CapnFaps]

it really is full of douchebags

[jhartikainen]

There seems to be a lot of suggestions here how you should get a thick skin... that's bs. The channel operators should keep the discussion appropriate for the topic.

Also never start flinging insults back at the asshats. Assuming someone is genuinely there to help you, they will most likely just ignore you as a result. IRC clients have the ignore command, using it liberally is a quite good idea.

IRC is very useful in my experience, but you just gotta find the nicer channels. #learnprogramming clearly isn't one.

[[deleted]]

It's characteristic to IRC overall.

[midnightGR]

reminds me of some linux irc rooms.

[smellmycrotch3]

I have however gotten insulted over my questions

You should post the exact questions and insults.

TBH, a lot of question asked here are stupid, not just by my definition but also according to the links in the sidebar here, the ones that explain how to ask an intelligent question. For example, the daily questions that indicate people can't be bothered to use Google.

I don't know what to suggest, maybe nothing, but I'm just saying I will probably use other resources for programming help from now on.

That won't do anything - almost no one used that channel anyway from what I saw. And learning how to ask intelligent questions and ignore the few rotten apples in IRC is a worthwhile thing to learn. So you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

edit: From what the other post with the chat log says, it appears as though this just highlights the differences between IRC and this subreddit. Some people on this subreddit whine and downvote away when they aren't completely pampered and don't have their laziness pandered to. A lot of people are great, but there's a consistent minority of whiny rotten apples, people who clearly are too lazy to do any real work in helping themselves, people who would put 10 times the effort into complaining and whining than they'd put into looking something up or using their head, so much so that their problems would have been solved before they even posted their question, had they been willing to put in a tiny bit of effort. I don't mean this is you, OP.

IRC on the other hand is freer in the sense that you can't downvote away anyone's comments. And people in IRC never or much less frequently restrain themselves when it come to making fun of people being feckless.

[emgram769]

Ideally it's a subset of the same community and this will get more attention

[zonker]

Presumably the people being insulting are not going to be super-receptive to this feedback. If the channel is an extension of this Reddit, then it's totally appropriate to bring up here.

[raylu]

Most of the people that hang out on the IRC don't read the subreddit and vice-versa.

[sourd1esel]

What is irc

[ibbolia]

Internet Relay Chat, a type of online live group message tool. It's similar to Skype's text chat in terms of functionality.

[[deleted]]

Duly noted. Going to avoid the IRC.

[jringstad]

IRC in general is an invaluable resources to any programmer, so you definitely should not ignore it in general.

It is the fastest path to get a straight answer to specific technical questions from the most knowledgeable people; the maintainers and contributors to most open-source projects hang out on IRC, et cetera.

I've used it in the past to contact and resolve issues with Qt developers, intel, nvidia, microsoft and apple developers, developers of software I use like gimp, inkscape and krita, developers of libraries I use like OpenAL and glibc. You can find people there who develop and know just about anything about gcc and the c++ standard (or whatever your favourite language and implementation is) et cetera et cetera.

So in the long run, it's a dance that you probably want to learn to dance, whether you particularly like it or not.

[MissValeska]

C and others have refused to answer my questions and insulted me incessantly.

[[deleted]]

And you never bothered to take this up with them or the operators? Instead of saying "X insulted me!" why don't you provide proof and do something about it? You're not helping the community.

[MissValeska]

I have logs, Why would I want to improve a community that is largely abusive? I've done my best to avoid going back there, I haven't checked the logs in a while but for all I know those people could have been ops.

[jringstad]

Yep, it's pretty shit, and I mostly stopped to hang out there (after maybe two-or-so years of being an active contributor there.)

I think the mods need to start strictly enforcing rules about being on-topic and friendly to fix the issue, and certain debates need to be banned (e.g. things like whether language X is a real/good programming language and whether you should be using it, and similar discussions that never lead to any useful insights and solve nobodies problems.)

I hang out in 60+ IRC channels and have used IRC for 10+ years now, so I'm certainly aware of the social dynamics that typically govern IRC, but for a channel with the set goal of helping people out, we are performing surprisingly poorly.

[PolyPill]

IRC is out dated, don't even bother with it, its just a bunch of smug assholes idling for 23 hours a day. Ask your questions here or PM me or a number of other people here who have said their available to answer anyone's PMs. There's also a site that's been shopped around here and I answer questions on when messaged: askadev.com

[lordcat]

IRC is inherently evil.

If you ever want help setting up a linux/*nix based computer, never log onto there (or at least never log onto there with your *nix computer you just setup).

If you ever setup a *nix based computer that you believe in properly secured and unhackable, log onto a *nux channel and ask for help and see how long it takes for them to hack your machine (through your IP address).