How to answer questions from newbies
Rustom Mody
rustompmody at gmail.com
Sun Feb 16 10:53:47 EST 2014
On Sunday, February 16, 2014 8:53:47 PM UTC+5:30, Roy Smith wrote:
> We get a lot of newbie questions on this list. People are eager to jump
> in and answer them (which is wonderful), but sometimes we get off on
> tangents about trivia and lose sight of the real question, and our
> audience.
> The particular one that set me off just now (I'm leaving off the names
> because it's a generic problem) was somebody asking a basic, "how do I
> code an algorithm to manipulate this data" question. They presented
> some sample data as a tuple of tuples.
> One of the (otherwise well-written and informative) responses started
> out with a 20-line treatise on the difference between lists and tuples,
> and why the OP should have used a list of tuples. Nothing they said was
> wrong, but it wasn't essential to explaining the algorithm.
> What I'm asking is that when people answer questions, try to figure out
> what the core question really is, and answer that first. If there's
> other suggestions you can make for how things might be further improved,
> add those later.
> Also, try to figure out what the experience level of the OP is, and
> scale your answer to fit their ability. I've seen people who are
> obviously struggling with basic concepts in an introductory programming
> class get responses that include list comprehensions, lambdas,
> map/reduce, etc. These are things people should learn along the road to
> Python guru-ness, but if you haven't figured out what a for loop is yet,
> those things are just going to confuse you even more.
Agreed!
Just one WARNING!
If you include comprehensions I shall include re's <wink>
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