Where has the practice of sending screen shots as source code come from?

[Steven D'Aprano]

I'm seeing this annoying practice more and more often. Even for trivial 
pieces of text, a few lines, people post screenshots instead of copying 
the code.

Where has this meme come from? It seems to be one which inconveniences 
*everyone* involved:

- for the sender, instead of a simple copy and paste, they have to take a 
screen shot, possibly trim the image to remove any bits of the screen 
they don't want to show, attach it to their email or upload it to an 
image hosting site;

- for the receiver, you are reliant on a forum which doesn't strip 
attachments, or displays externally hosted images; the visually impaired 
are excluded from using a screen reader; and nobody can copy or edit the 
given text.

It is as if people are deliberately inconveniencing themselves in order 
to inconvenience the people they are asking to help them.

With the exception of one *exceedingly* overrated advantage, namely the 
ability to annotate the image with coloured lines and circles and 
squiggles or other graphics (which most people don't bother to do), this 
seems to me to be 100% counter-productive for everyone involved. Why has 
it spread and why do people keep doing it?

I don't want to be the old man yelling "Get Of My Lawn!" to the cool 
kids, but is this just another sign of the downward spiral of programming 
talent? Convince me that there is *some* justification for this practice. 
Even a tiny one.

(The day a programmer posts a WAV file of themselves reading their code 
out aloud, is the day I turn my modem off and leave the internet forever.)



-- 
Steve