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I understand your position. Presumably SO wants to maximize its readership. What I've seen is that they allow any programming question, even of trivial nature,
by genwin 13y ago
I understand your position.
Presumably SO wants to maximize its readership. What I've seen is that they allow any programming question, even of trivial nature, as long as it's objective not subjective. I like that and think it's a good way to maximize readership for objective stuff, because I often google for trivial things. For example, Powershell if/else/elseif syntax, if I haven't used Powershell in a while. I just found the syntax on SO within 10 seconds, with an example I can copy/paste/modify. I bet a lot of other developers use SO like that too, and I bet it's largely the reason people put trivial questions on there. My motivation is efficiency. Being efficient can be construed as lazy I guess!
- danbruc 13y agoI do the same - if the first search result is on StackOverflow I will of course just look at that. But if the first result is not on StackOverflow I will read whatever is there and not ask a question on StackOverflow unless the answer to my problem is not or hard to find. So in essence I am uncomfortable if people don't try hard enough to find the answer in existing sources. How long hard enough takes obviously depends on the context. For something I am an expert in I can conclude after a few hours that I have to ask. If you for example start learning your first programming language I would expect you to try at least a day, probably even a couple of days to find the solution by reading manuals, tutorials and books before you ask a question.
- genwin 13y agoAgreed, I don't ask trivial questions myself.