[Tutor] Writing the right code rite

[Avi Gross]

Steve,

I appreciated your letter and it helped point me in the direction this group
may be designed for. For some it is sort of like forms of therapy where the
goal is to help them reach an insight rather than toss a diagnosis at them
and maybe write a prescription. The ultimate goal is to learn how to use
resources by yourself. I am so used to doing my own work and getting a real
understanding, that it is not easy to adjust to how some others are like the
Help Vampires in the article you quoted.

Having read it, I do recognize how some people I know may fit into that
category and I have often after a while automatically set up not enabling
them in some of the ways you describe. Amusingly enough, I have lived in
Transylvania (border area where Romania and Hungary meet) and never met any
(nonexistent) Vampires. But they seem to be everywhere in books and on TV so
why not HELP Vampires. 

Avi
-----Original Message-----
From: Tutor <tutor-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On Behalf Of
Steven D'Aprano
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2018 5:40 AM
To: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] Writing the right code rite

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 07:18:46PM -0500, Avi Gross wrote:

> What kind of answers have people provided?

The archives of this mailing list go back to 1994. If you spend some time
browsing randomly at the answers people provide, you should get a feel for
what sort of answers we tend to give.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/



> I know it slows things down, especially with a moderator, but often 
> the best answer is to ask some questions before trying to supply an
answer.

Indeed. Learning how to ask good questions is part of the learning process,
and when people ask poor questions, asking questions in return will either:

- teach them by example what sort of information they need to solve their
problem; or

- discourage the lazy help-vampires from draining the energy out of this
group.

http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm



> Perhaps a
> rapid email exchange directly with a student, perhaps moving on to 
> instant messaging or phone or video forms of communication would work 
> better for those interested.

Of course you are an adult in a free country and you have the right to do
whatever you like, but I don't recommend this. In fact I would consider it
anti-social and hostile to the rest of the community.

I think I speak for most of us when I say we're looking to help and educate
the entire community. We're not the personal servants of individual posters,
or private teachers. We post so that *everyone* can learn from the answers,
not just the person asking the question, and the
*process* of reaching the answer is just as important as the final code. 

Taking that process off-list is, in my opinion, not helping the community.
(Here, I'm not speaking for others.)

Its also likely to get annoying fast, for both parties: you, when the poster
starts bombarding you with question after question, and the poster
themselves, when you are too slow to respond. At least if they email the
list, there is the opportunity for others to reply in your stead.

Of course there are circumstances where it is appropriate to take discussion
off-list:

- you're being paid to help;

- the discussion wanders off-topic;

- or it becomes irrelevant and of no interest to the rest of the community
(perhaps because it is too specialised to interest anyone but yourself and
the original poster);

- or moves into confidential/private areas of discussions that shouldn't be
posted to the list (were you asked to sign an NDA?);

etc. Some subjective judgement may be required.


> When done, you might post a summary if appropriate for others 
> interested but note showing a full solution can be unfair if other 
> students working on the same problem just latch on to that.

The community standard here is that we don't do homework for others. 
We'll answer concrete questions about Python the language itself, of
course: "how do I use the zip function?". We'll help them debug their code,
if they've written some code.

If they haven't written even a single line of code, we generally don't do
much more than say "Show us what you've tried."

We'll help guide people towards solutions, but not hand them the solution on
a platter.

That's for students in school, of course. We're a bit more flexible when it
comes to self-learners or even professional programmers asking for help. And
we usually take it on trust if they say "this isn't homework".

But even then, we're not the personal slave of the poster, and we have no
obligation to solve their problem for them. We're not obliged to hand over a
complete solution, and in fact doing so goes against our stated aim to
*teach* people. (How will they learn effectively if we do their work for
them?)

Again, some subjective judgement is required. I wouldn't hesitate to answer
minor or trivial questions in full, e.g. "how do I count the number of
digits in a string?". If it were homework, I might answer a slightly
different question instead:

number_of_vowels = sum(thestring.count(vowel) for vowel in "aeiouAEIOU")

and let them generalise to digits. But more substantial questions, I
probably wouldn't unless the problem really tickled my fancy and I had
plenty of time to work on a solution.

(Time. I remember when I had time.)


--
Steve
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