4 ms·

> Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort was

by SCdF 9y ago

> Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted. This is exactly how I feel about asking a question! Except "Actually I'm doing this" is "why don't you do that" or "why are you doing this" etc. > Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer My feeling is that they aren't answering the question though, not the core one, there finding a thing that you're wrong about and talking about that instead. It's like taking the above paragraph and refuting it by saying "*they're". Yes there is an (intentional) spelling mistake in there, but is that really the point of that it's trying to say?

jodrellblank 9y ago
my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. "How do I parse x from some text my code is (pile of code)" "you could do y approach (code with example test) but it might break in z condition will you have z condition?" "I'm trying to get a result from this" "Well if you'd said so there's a built in way to do that directly exasperated" Is that "not answering the core question"? That, I feel, leads to "why are you doing this?" style comments. Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Because anyone can edit questions to correct that kind of "clarification" and I do see people quietly doing that to help questioners with mangled markdown formatting and similar
- SCdF 9y ago
  > my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. Totally. > Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Sometimes. I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to pick on specific examples, but what I really mean is nitpicks that are irrelevant to the core question. For me the core pain felt like: - Askers working out how much context to bring to a question - Answerers not presuming there is more context to the question - The ensuing fight spread over answers, re-edits and comments, leaving a gross complicated passive aggressive mess at the end of it So you don't want to explain your entire life story, and when you encounter problems you usually aren't working on something that easily compresses into 20 lines of code. So there is expected and undestandable challenge in compressing your example. Not bringing too much context is also important, because you're trying to ask one specific question, not the hundreds of potential questions in your codebase. But often times I feel answerers will take your example, presume it's literally that, even with `foo` and `bar` as classnames or whatever, and take it completely as face value and then point out why it's obviously stupid, even when those stupid things are ancillary to the main point, and there only because it's compressed example code. Extra context to my opinions here: I haven't seriously contributed to SO in at least 5 years. I probably ask 1-2 questions a year now, and do so with great trepidation. Grain of salt and all that,

by SCdF 9y ago

jodrellblank 9y ago

my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. "How do I parse x from some text my code is (pile of code)" "you could do y approach (code with example test) but it might break in z condition will you have z condition?" "I'm trying to get a result from this" "Well if you'd said so there's a built in way to do that directly exasperated" Is that "not answering the core question"? That, I feel, leads to "why are you doing this?" style comments. Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Because anyone can edit questions to correct that kind of "clarification" and I do see people quietly doing that to help questioners with mangled markdown formatting and similar

SCdF 9y ago
> my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. Totally. > Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Sometimes. I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to pick on specific examples, but what I really mean is nitpicks that are irrelevant to the core question. For me the core pain felt like: - Askers working out how much context to bring to a question - Answerers not presuming there is more context to the question - The ensuing fight spread over answers, re-edits and comments, leaving a gross complicated passive aggressive mess at the end of it So you don't want to explain your entire life story, and when you encounter problems you usually aren't working on something that easily compresses into 20 lines of code. So there is expected and undestandable challenge in compressing your example. Not bringing too much context is also important, because you're trying to ask one specific question, not the hundreds of potential questions in your codebase. But often times I feel answerers will take your example, presume it's literally that, even with `foo` and `bar` as classnames or whatever, and take it completely as face value and then point out why it's obviously stupid, even when those stupid things are ancillary to the main point, and there only because it's compressed example code. Extra context to my opinions here: I haven't seriously contributed to SO in at least 5 years. I probably ask 1-2 questions a year now, and do so with great trepidation. Grain of salt and all that,