The questions we get these days!
-
zaphnath wrote:
People are inherently lazy and when encountering an obstacle, will naturally tend towards the easiest way out.
Just like water and electricity.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
-
Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
Erudite_Eric wrote:
Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
There is a major difference between studying a programming course and being enrolled in one.
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. " — Hunter S. Thompson
-
Yeah, and you could get a really big one for a nickel, too. But perhaps I should stay on point.
About eight years ago, it was my duty to assist a young graduate student, who had an "intern" position with my employer, in getting to work and back each day. One day while we were in transit, this intern, whom we shall call Miss Smith, stunned me by saying with no trace of embarrassment that she never could understand the difference between disk storage and RAM, or why it was important.
Yes, you read that right. I'll wait while you unswallow your tongues.
Mind you, Miss Smith was quite intelligent, on the verge of receiving a Master's degree in Computer Science. She was near to completing a major, much needed transformation of our employer's extensive documentation database. But her education in Computer Science had exposed her only to interpretive tools such as Visual Basic, Access, and Excel. She had never had to run a compiler or linkage editor. She had never had to debug a program interactively. She didn't know what "assembly language" is. In short, she had never had to grapple with the physical reality underneath the virtual world maintained by her interpretive tools.
Yet Miss Smith's skills with those tools were considerable and quite valuable. I have no doubt that she received her Master's degree, and went on to become someone's well-paid employee, on the strength of what she knew.
At the time of the conversation mentioned above, I went into a great, gesture-filled, loathsomely detailed presentation on the differences between RAM and offline storage, why each was necessary and neither was sufficient, and what the divergence between the two could mean according to circumstances. It took the whole of an hour's ride, and I wasn't nearly finished when Miss Smith wished me a good evening, stepped gracefully out of my car, and fled screaming in terror for her dorm room. To this day, I can't be sure that she grasped any fraction of what I said...or, in all candor, whether it would have mattered if she hadn't.
It was possible for Miss Smith to get by without the knowledge under discussion because the tools with which she worked made it unnecessary. Whether it will ever become necessary is questionable; indeed, it becomes less and less likely as time passes and developers' tools increase further in power.
Now, what was that about linked lists?
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
The young lady was far ahead of you :) Look at the details of virtual memory and paging. With a little imagination you can see that we actually could do without a traditional file system by placing everything into one huge virtual memory space. Data would be swapped between the disk and the memory as needed automatically. It would be different to what we are used to, but we would never have to deal with file systems again.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
-
If a doctor posted an 'urgentz pls' post I would go find another doctor. Actually what they use is a vast library of books and material to check symptoms causes and cures. What we did in our day was use books too, and work it out ourselves by trying things out. It seems that experimentation today is dead.
============================== Nothing to say.
Erudite_Eric wrote:
Actually what they use is a vast library of books and material to check symptoms causes and cures.
Well, not really! I have done and still do a lot of programming, but my 'day job' was (I am retired) as an Anesthesiologist and Intensivist, and I was generally reckoned a pretty good one. In my speciality, you may have time to research problems you anticipate, but you frequently don't have time to research the unexpected ones, which are often more challenging. The skill comes in being able to anticipate more than 'the average bear' and particularly in rapidly extracting from your prior experiences and/or previous reading/learning the material that is most relevant to the current problem. In less acute specialities, there is more time to think, but putting the gestalt of the patient's presentation (not just signs and symptoms, but also past history and personal circumstances) together into a picture that leads to diagnosis and treatment involves much more than "checking symptoms causes and cures" in "a vast library". Medicine is still at least 40% Art.
-
The young lady was far ahead of you :) Look at the details of virtual memory and paging. With a little imagination you can see that we actually could do without a traditional file system by placing everything into one huge virtual memory space. Data would be swapped between the disk and the memory as needed automatically. It would be different to what we are used to, but we would never have to deal with file systems again.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
(chuckle) Far enough, I suppose. Still, there's something chilling about a "Computer Science" major unaware of the functions of the computer's various components:
- She'd never heard of the CPU registers;
- She'd never been introduced to the concept of virtual memory;
- She had no idea that her whole development world was virtual;
- "Communications protocol? What's that?"
- "You mean there's more than one?"
Among the classical-era Greeks, physicians proposed a model of the human body as "a bag of blood," with organs floating in it here and there. Miss Smith's model of the computer was comparable...except that the organs were something of a mystery to her. She probably wished they'd "go away"...at least, after she'd escaped my tutelage.
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
-
G-Tek wrote:
"There's no such thing as stupid questions... only stupid people."
I've seen both.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
-
Generally that may be so, but those people appear more like mountain climbers who discover that they are not fit enough at the foot of the mountain and then look for somebody to carry them to the peak. What's the point? Does it make them fitter or more experienced climbers? Where is the accomplishment? Laziness can only get unliked chores out of the way. This raises the question why all those people work on things they are not interested in and obviously have no ambition to put any work into. As far as I know there is nobody forcing them to do this at gunpoint.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
CDP1802 wrote:
Where is the accomplishment?
Exactly!
CDP1802 wrote:
This raises the question why all those people work on things they are not interested in and obviously have no ambition to put any work into.
This seems to be the rule rather than the exception, and not just in our industry. When I was a teenager flipping burgers, my peers would complain about not having any money to go out, buy this, do that, etc. But when they clocked in for their shift, they then started complaining about having to work. Heaven forbid they get asked to work both Friday and Saturday night! :doh: As an aside, while my burgers and hot dogs took a bit longer to get out, they actually resembled the ones you would see on posters and tv commercials. I was proud of that. I hear much the same from adults today. My father-in-law used to call them clock watchers. As soon as they get to work, they're counting down the hours until quitting time. When Monday morning rolls around, they're already wanting Friday to get here so they can take a break. I realize not everyone is like this, and some folks may not be able to change jobs, but for those that are going through the motions just to get a paycheck...:mad: ;P
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
-
(chuckle) Far enough, I suppose. Still, there's something chilling about a "Computer Science" major unaware of the functions of the computer's various components:
- She'd never heard of the CPU registers;
- She'd never been introduced to the concept of virtual memory;
- She had no idea that her whole development world was virtual;
- "Communications protocol? What's that?"
- "You mean there's more than one?"
Among the classical-era Greeks, physicians proposed a model of the human body as "a bag of blood," with organs floating in it here and there. Miss Smith's model of the computer was comparable...except that the organs were something of a mystery to her. She probably wished they'd "go away"...at least, after she'd escaped my tutelage.
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
Our intern's favorite word used to be 'nowadays', especially when telling me about those oldschool thinges we 'nowadays' don't have to waste any thought about anymore. He already has begun to change his tune since he started writing some code for a 'weak' 1 GHz dual core ARM processor, but the young Padawan still has a lot to learn :) Seriously, this is the stuff they are taught and they don't have any choice but to believe it. I remember well how the Professor started with 'Nowadays (!) the compilers are better than the average assembly programmer' when I still sat at the school bench. He thought I was a bit arrogant when I told him that I usually don't aim for the average. He did not know that I had about 12 years experience in assembly programming at that time. Anyway, I can see how you can get a degree in computer science by specializing on the more abstract stuff.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
-
Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
Some of us actually enjoy the process of breaking down a problem and figuring it out, but are told that the manager doesn't care HOW we get the answer as long as we get the answer NOW!!! Solution, turn to teh interwebs, ask the question and continue to work on the answer as you await a reply.
-
Generally that may be so, but those people appear more like mountain climbers who discover that they are not fit enough at the foot of the mountain and then look for somebody to carry them to the peak. What's the point? Does it make them fitter or more experienced climbers? Where is the accomplishment? Laziness can only get unliked chores out of the way. This raises the question why all those people work on things they are not interested in and obviously have no ambition to put any work into. As far as I know there is nobody forcing them to do this at gunpoint.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
CDP1802 wrote:
Generally that may be so, but those people appear more like mountain climbers who discover that they are not fit enough at the foot of the mountain and then look for somebody to carry them to the peak. What's the point? Does it make them fitter or more experienced climbers? Where is the accomplishment?
Your analogy... There are in fact many people at the bottom of that mountain that... - Really want to do it themselves. - Want to do it the 'correct' way - Accept the challenge - Accept that they must spend time learning. And despite that have no idea how to actually get started and certainly have no idea what/how to ask questions. And some do not even understand what a "mountain" is.
-
Perhaps this a case of "preservation bias"? Today any reasonably smart person with an "average" problem can find answers by themselves (by searching web forums, online books, Wikipedia, etc). Therefore there's a world of questions that get answered without ever being registered (e.g. by being posted to a forum). With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up from the extremes: 1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find any; 2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves. The state of mankind being what it is, it's not hard to figure that type 2 questions will come up much more often than type 1.
xperroni wrote:
With the middle ground all but covered, questions will virtually always come up from the extremes:
1. Very difficult and/or novel questions from very smart people, who did look for references but couldn't find any;
2. Trivial problems from very stupid people, who couldn't bother to (or didn't realize they could) look it up by themselves.That however is a matter of perception. I suspect there are a number of mathematicians that would find any number of problems "trivial", yet which even the most enthusiastic beginning hobbyist would find very difficult. As an example in programming I now find it trivially easy to understand recursion and even to unroll a recursive methods. But I also remember that when I was first introduced to recursion it took me 18 months to finally understand it. Further your simplistic scenario ignored the simple statistical fact...people that post here, by definition, must be those that even if they did do research did not find or did not understand the answers they did find. Thus there could be tens or hundreds times the number of people who are successfully learning by themselves.
-
Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
Erudite_Eric wrote:
in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model?
16 bit code? Oh, we used to dream of having 16 bits! And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you. :-D
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
-
Chuck O'Toole wrote:
Back in the 60's, we had professors who lectured
Back in the 60's I was learning programming on the job from my peers, and reading the manuals.
Unrequited desire is character building. OriginalGriff I'm sitting here giving you a standing ovation - Len Goodman
Back in the 60's my mother was being born. So yeah. I think that this issue is not only disturbing regarding the fact that people shoot questions on the internet void hoping for an answer to come from the beyond, but as in some cases in which I worked with "experienced" developers which had to ask me, an "I have been programming as a job for 6 months" student how to retrieve items to a .net list. It's everywhere, and its spreading fast. You better cover up!
- Arthur Souza www.lotusrpg.com.br
-
Back in the 60's my mother was being born. So yeah. I think that this issue is not only disturbing regarding the fact that people shoot questions on the internet void hoping for an answer to come from the beyond, but as in some cases in which I worked with "experienced" developers which had to ask me, an "I have been programming as a job for 6 months" student how to retrieve items to a .net list. It's everywhere, and its spreading fast. You better cover up!
- Arthur Souza www.lotusrpg.com.br
arthurfsouza wrote:
I worked with "experienced" developers which had to ask me, an "I have been programming as a job for 6 months" student how to retrieve items to a .net list.
I get the point you are trying to make, but just because a person is experienced, that does not automatically mean they are experienced in the same disciplines as you.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
-
arthurfsouza wrote:
I worked with "experienced" developers which had to ask me, an "I have been programming as a job for 6 months" student how to retrieve items to a .net list.
I get the point you are trying to make, but just because a person is experienced, that does not automatically mean they are experienced in the same disciplines as you.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
I find the existence of experienced .net developers that don't know how to retrieve an item from a generic List much more disturbing than that of students that just throw questions on the internet expecting answers from the beyond. Or perhaps one evolves (using that word loosely) into another.
- Arthur Souza www.lotusrpg.com.br
-
Touchè I was just thinking last night that I miss the days of UseNet. One learned fairly quickly from some really brutal responses what was and was not acceptable. Moreover, flame-wars and grilling the truly inept were seen as sport. But now, since we all have to play nicely the standard has stooped to that of the lowliest competitor - bring back the days of measure-up or be chewed-up and spat-out! The sum total of the documentation/help I had available when starting out were: The help file for Turbo Pascal 6.0, the help file for Borland c++ 3.1 and (the one I spent most time with) the commented output of Sourer, a dissasembler whose serial number I still recall now some 19 years after first getting it B309868-YTHT
Agree fully with this - it's kinda what I came here to say. WE have caused this problem by allowing it to continue, and even some people (Stack Overflow) are making money off this problem. On Stack Overflow, you can't say "dumb question, moron, RTFM" as it's against the community guidelines for what's acceptable. So, they've made it a rule that you have to be an idiot to ask a question on the site. The problem comes when you have a real question that you really need the help of the community. I have several unanswered questions on Stack Overflow because of that. It's not a site where you can ask the hard questions, and if you do, you're ignored because it's not easy to "get points" by providing a thoughtful answer, it requires work, and when you can get points on the site by doing Google searches on behalf of other users, there isn't much motivation for people to want to improve themselves by exploring the difficult stuff. We need to be able to say "FGI" to people and CLOSE the question when it's stupid. AND, we, as a community, should let the idiots flounder. When someone asks a dumb question and you help them, you are perpetuating the problem. If we can't flame them, we could at least IGNORE them. Please.
-
Agree fully with this - it's kinda what I came here to say. WE have caused this problem by allowing it to continue, and even some people (Stack Overflow) are making money off this problem. On Stack Overflow, you can't say "dumb question, moron, RTFM" as it's against the community guidelines for what's acceptable. So, they've made it a rule that you have to be an idiot to ask a question on the site. The problem comes when you have a real question that you really need the help of the community. I have several unanswered questions on Stack Overflow because of that. It's not a site where you can ask the hard questions, and if you do, you're ignored because it's not easy to "get points" by providing a thoughtful answer, it requires work, and when you can get points on the site by doing Google searches on behalf of other users, there isn't much motivation for people to want to improve themselves by exploring the difficult stuff. We need to be able to say "FGI" to people and CLOSE the question when it's stupid. AND, we, as a community, should let the idiots flounder. When someone asks a dumb question and you help them, you are perpetuating the problem. If we can't flame them, we could at least IGNORE them. Please.
In Quick Answers you have the ability to close questions where the poster has made no attempt to allow others to help them. This feature will be added to the discussion forums.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
-
Well, you're right in that it's too easy to just shoot a question into the great Internet Void (tm) and sit back and wait for an answer. One of the things that kill me is the number of questions that claim to be "urgent" yet they're willing to wait for who known how many hours for somebody to notice their question on CP or anywhere else. If it's "urgent" you should be researching it yourself. Personally, I blame the instructors (since apparently many of these questioners are in classes somewhere). Linked Lists, Reading / Writing Files, this is all Computer Science 1 stuff yet there are no apparent "cookbook answers" or "class tutorials" on this stuff that explains it more fully. You'd think that problems with this stuff would be a predictable outcome so instructors should prepare to instruct on the topic. And maybe it's the proliferation of "online universities" where there is no physical contact with a "teaching staff" who can provide personalized instruction / answers. Back in the 60's, we had professors who lectured and Teaching Assistants who held other classes and a group of top students (Program Advisors) that sat at desks in the Comp Sci Department and helped fellow students through the homework assignments. I did that job for a couple of semesters. Who provides that service now? Code Project and other such sites.
I went back for new training in '04. The instructors were leaving most in the dust, while for me, they were clearly describing something I'd already read in the text books handed out before classes started. It was semi-helpful review for me because I'd cracked open the books and read them as much as I could before class started. I've attended lectures where that person left me in the dust, because I didn't know there was research I could have done ahead of time. In both cases, they weren't of much help to me because I'm more of a visual learner.
-
Erudite_Eric wrote:
in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model?
16 bit code? Oh, we used to dream of having 16 bits! And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you. :-D
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
-
Is it just me or not but in my day we didn't ask for help at the first hurdle and things were hard then, no internet, remember compiling 16 bit code for the large memory model? We had to find the answers ourselves. It strikes me it is too easy today to throw an ill-formed/undefined question at CP and expect an answer! What happened to research? What happened to thinking out a problem till you got the the very nub of the issue; because once you know the right question to ask, the answer almost suggests itself. I mean, linked lists, writing data to a file? Thats really simple stuff that anyone studying a programming course should e able to work out for themselves!
============================== Nothing to say.
I remember reading through the multi-hundred page MS-DOS 3.3 manual, remembering the commands. I remember reading through the text files on my "teach yourself C" CD with it's Symantec C compiler, and from that made DOS based graphics interface EXE files. I remember learning HTML basics by reading the RFC after downloading them from work ( oh joy, a 2 megabit connection at work in 1998 along with 40 PPM printers :D ). All the basics of opening, reading and writing to files, were as valid in C in 1995 as they are today in PHP, but I am continually surprised by the level of some developers I work with. I'm in a PHP house at the moment. They all want to make their own "frameworks", but when it comes to raw language, how to read and write to a file, error handling, bounds checking, loop control (come on now!), the young'uns today seem to have lost the basics. Ok you can build a castle on sand, but don't expect it to last the centures before it falls over. Come on guys. If you are really lost, go bug your local library and borrow somthing written by Donald Knuth along with a language reference. If you cannot solve the problem with that, *then* come here and yell for help! I don't mind people using the internet to look things up, it's the best reference manual there is today, especially as Einstein is supposed to have said somthing like "the most important is not to know, but to know where to look", but you really have to push this one just a tad further. "Seek and ye shall find", but "understand and ye shall know". This one people tend to forget. I'll help people who help themselves :) In the end though, I really get the feeling that I am the last of my species: The self taught geek who relys on his own brain. Oh well. I'll still try to make the most of it while it lasts !!! Cheers, Daniel
