Checking a Number for Palindromic Behavior

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On 10/21/2009 02:56 PM, Tim Chase wrote:
> rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:
>> On 10/21/2009 01:40 AM, Lie Ryan wrote:
>>> rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:
>>>>>> 1) It may look like a homework problem to you but it
>>>>>>  probably isn't.
>>>>>>  Seehttp://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/8ac6db43b09fdc92
>>>>> Homework comes in many forms - school driven homework should be
>>>>> treated the same as self driven research, IMO. You're not doing it to
>>>>> be told the answer, you're likely doing it to learn.
>>>> As I said in point (5), you are not in a position to
>>>> decide how someone else best learns, even if your guess
>>>> that the question is homework, contrary to the evidence
>>>> in the url, is correct.
>
> Amusingly, this came along today:
> http://lifehacker.com/5386722/get-it-wrong-before-you-google-to-learn-it-better

Cool!  That's great news!  The educational community has
been arguing for centuries about the best ways to teach
people.  I am glad that Scientific American article has
finally settled the matter.

> I'd postulate that the same holds for heaving a question out on
> c.l.p without taking at crack at it yourself.  Try it, and if you
> fail, take your findings to the great Google or to Usenet.  But
> not even trying (or evidencing your effort) is bound to get you
> ignored or derided.  Effectively "Hey programmer people, do my
> work for me".

You're conflating two separate issues.  1) Whether trying
to write code to solve a problem before seeing working
code is helpful to learning or not, and 2) Whether you
are being taken advantage of by being conned into doing
something for someone else who themselves didn't do as
much work as you think they should have.

1) is about helping the poster.
2) is about you.

I suspect that 2 is really the most important to you.

>[...]
>> You are also way understating the effort in Googling
>> something.  I have spent literally days wading through
>> thousands of pages of Google results trying to find
>> accuate info before.
>
> This seems more to be a lack of your own google-fu...

Could be.  However the first time I realized the Google
wasn't the miracle I originally thought it was is when I
had an Windows NT machine that would sometimes refuse to
let me delete a file, reporting only the classically
Windowsesque message, "Unable to delete file".  Try
googling for "windows NT file delete" sometime.  The
point being the successful searching is highly dependent
on having specific search terms.

>> No it doesn't imply any such thing.  It is exactly this
>> narrowness of focus, this inability to see alternate
>> explanations, that is leading you to think that
>> providing hints is the single one and only right
>> way of responding to any simple question on this list.
>>
>> They may post here because, ...(ready for this?)...
>> they want a direct answer to their question!
>
> The best way to get a direct answer is to show that you've
> already made some effort.  Usually this involves including some
> code.  It's a newsgroup composed of people volunteering their
> time conversing with others, not a vending-machine thanklessly
> spewing free answers.

This discussion is not about the best way to get
answers (about which I happen to agree with you); it
is about whether you have the moral right not only
to *demand* that a poster follow your guidelines but
to also *demand* that I *not* offer help to a poster
because *you* think the poster doesn't deserve it.
Sorry but I prefer to rely on my own judgment in such
cases.

>[...]
>
> My hope then is that these people whom you coddle with spoon-fed
> answers end up working with/for you instead of me.

This illustrates part of the problem.  You apparently
see every poster as a professional Python programmer
who is or will be working in a software shop doing
professional development.  I concede that is true for
many posters but there are a lot of people who don't
fit that profile -- syadmin's who need to automate
some of their tasks, students and computer aficionados
who want to write a program to manage their mp3 collection,
scientists and engineers who are more interested in
getting an answer than writing unit tests, retirees
who want a new challenge to stave off Alzheimers,
home linux computer users who want to fix or modify
a system tool, and on and on...

Not all of these people want to be "taught" in bits
and pieces over several posts, the correct way of
professionally programming in Python, especially not
by a method that you, who are not even trained in
educational methods and are working without any sort
of plan or curriculum, decide is the best, only, way
to learn.

And even for the to-be professional programmers, you
still have not shown that seeing a worked out example
of a problem is necessarily damaging.  As I related
earlier, from my personal experience I know this is
not true -- in my case the opposite was true; a simple
direct answer more beneficial than the long experiential
answer.