Careful what you wish for
30 Jan 2020
Reading through the essay by Eric Raymond I learned about what he considers smart questions and how to go about asking them. It’s strange to me that he went through the trouble of writing this guide, for as I read his guidelines I thought to myself that these were common practices before posting a question online. I am unfortunately wrong. To see whether or not Raymond needed to write this essay, I took to Stack Overflow, as he mentions in his essay that this is the place to ask any question you have in regards to programming. Just by looking at the first page of questions I could already see his reason behind creating the essay.
Most questions I saw were written well enough that I couldn’t really cast any negative judgement on them. However, one post caught my eye for being so noticably off. The question title is, “Switch to the app of webview of INSTAGRAM is not working enen when we have instagram already installed in android” and the posted question posted is, “When we try to open webview of instagram. And when we press Switch to the app It throw error. Please refer both screen shot for reference. Thanks in advance.” I will say that I like their kind regards that he ends his question with, but the question itself is lacking in a few areas that Raymond mentions. Both the title and question contain grammar and spelling errors, which isn’t too bad since I am assuming English isn’t their first language. Raymond states that’s okay, but they should perhaps mention that fact. I’m not well versed in app development, but I think this question is in regards to that, however it’s very hard to tell what they need help with and if it’s related to programming, for their wording is vary vague. Unfortunately for them they recieved no answer yet, probably due to the previously stated reasons.
Thankfully, not too far into the question board I was able to find what I considered a smart question. This person’s question title was, “Why are strings in C char * not char[]? [duplicate]” and his question was similar saying, “What are the benefits of declaring a character array with char str = “Hello World” and not char str[] = “Hello World”? Shouldn’t they behave the same?” Raymond says that the question should be clear and the subject title informative, both of which are fulfilled in this person’s post. Additionally, the question is clearly about programming and they even provide sample code to show what they are talking about. Because of this, the poster was able to recieve an answer that was well written to remedy their curiosity.
In my academic career as a Computer Science major, I have had many bumps in the road leading to me questioning how to do certain aspects of programming and have on more than one occasion needed to ask for help, but I feel as if me asking for help is bothersome to those I ask. As Raymond reccommends, I search through Google and Stack Overflow in hopes of finding what I need or even hunting in the course textbooks for an answer, but that doesn’t always give me what I need. Only then do I approach others that are knowledgable with a question that’s clear, so that they can best help me. Seen in the examples I found, it’s easy to see the results of applying Raymond’s strategy and not doing so, and this is important for fellow software engineers to understand since they are bound to find themselves posting to Stack Overflow at some point in their career.
I can see the difficulties in asking for help, since to some people, including myself, it’s like admitting defeat and you can’t do it on your own. However, by reaching out for help it actually shows you’re willingness to grow and eagerness to learn. Myself and others should be encouraged to be fearless and ask those burning questions of theirs, but they should do so in a “smart” way as decribed by Raymond. This will not only benefit the asker, but those wanting to help.