The XY problem: > This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help

The XY problem: > This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help. This is not really true though. The time spent to answer is not wasted. There are people searching for it via Google, e.g. how to get the last N characters from a variable, and they will find the correct answer. The time spent by the asker is never wasted. I sometimes know that this is not directly the thing I want to solve, or how I stumbled upon this question. Still, it's a question I have because I'm curious and I just want to know. So, in any case, the person asking for help will learn something. And all other people on the Internet who stumble upon the question are likely searching for exactly the answer to this exact question, so they get some good value out of it. Or even if not, it likely will have references to what they are interested in. Those other people are ignored here.