4 ms·
If you're the one asking the question for the first time, yes, you should make it clear in your wording that you know about X and you really want Y. There are
by jbay808 5y ago
If you're the one asking the question for the first time, yes, you should make it clear in your wording that you know about X and you really want Y.
There are two failure modes though:
1) You really want to do Y, not X. You are not asking the question, just searching for the answer, and find that "how do you do Y?" question, and the answer is "do X instead". Because you're a special case, these answers will likely dominate your search results.
2) You decide to ask the question. You make it very clear that you want to do Y, not X. Your question is closed as a duplicate of the one whose answer was "do X".
- LanceH 5y agoI've come across this multiple times. Some communities are worse than others on StackOverflow about it. Golang in particular seems to look for reasons not to answer a question, and I've come across your 2nd more than once. Typical situation: I get called in as a consultant/freelance/whatever, I inherited X. I can make a small patch if I can do Y. Even when I preface it with "I would normally rewrite X correctly, but that touches on all systems, how can I do Y?" It turns straight into an argument about doing X right. It's like I'm driving, make a left turn and end up lost. They are telling me to make the right turn at Albuquerque instead of the left. Other scenario is that I'm trying to glean some insight on the language and I'll reduce a problem to bare basics and ask something like, "what's going on here?" They will answer "don't use that, use X library instead." That wasn't the question, the question was what's going on with the programming language -- why is it acting weird. I know that nobody would write the code that way, I isolated the problem to specifically inspect a single element.