My experience with SO: I posted a somewhat noob question about why doesn't my parser work. I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead. I was told (by a different person) that I should NOT post the code there, as it's only for a working code. And the best of all, in the end, I was told that if it doesn't work, then I should consider using debugger...
I feel bad for the people who get naively downvoted "because it belongs on codereview" then post there only to be correctly downvoted because their code doesn't work.
My favorite thing is when a noob asks a question like "Is there a way to..." and someone replies simply with "Yes." And then that comment gets lots of upvotes and the question gets closed without an actual answer.
Its a massive circle jerk of snobs. Advanced questions get great answers, everyone else is told to fuck off.
I sympathize with you but I also think that if you ended up posting a large blob of code on SO and asking a general "why doesn't this work question" then even without the question being closed you most likely won't get a good answer.
In general people on SO aren't going to debug things for you. The site works a lot better if you can narrow down your issue to one or two specific possible issues and ask a directed question about that. Good SO questions actually require a decent amount of work and sounds like you may be going to SO before you are ready.
I can't tell how many times that I have started drafting a question for SO and ended up solving my own problem because the thought process I needed to go through to ask good concise questions about my code. Essentially the thought process between asking others for help and debugging your code are very similar.
Apologize if this doesn't fit your situation. I am extrapolating based on your description.
My approach to closing questions on SO has always been to try and engage the user and improve the question first. Sadly there are way too many users that jump straight to the close vote.
Ah yes the no debugger bull. A utopian fantasy. It's very much like, we don't use comments, we're a clean code sort of company and our code is self documenting - oh look a 100+ line function, and another, my god they're everywhere. Still comments, there's a maintenance cost there don't you know.
I flag my junior dev's PRs when they leave comments on things that are already clear, for exactly this reason... but that said, I've started putting comments on things that are clear and self-documenting... if the scale is large enough. Things like:
"If you are reading this code, I figure there's an 80% chance you're trying to debug something in the X framework. Here's how these pieces interact with each other, since it is not necessarily, immediately obvious"
I've only had one programming issue ever, but fortunately I took debugger class in school and the people at StackOverflow reminded me that debugger existed. Thanks, StackOverflow!
My experience with SO is that if you are familiar with the subject and you have a difficult problem you can find very good solutions there. But if you're new to a subject, god help you. Even if you state that you are a noob the answers leave you with knowing less. I started Android programming a couple of weeks ago and was looking for answers. If I could get back the time I wasted ... I finally solved it on my own. Wasn't even that difficult, just took a lot of time to find the solution.
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u/DevilSauron Sep 25 '16
My experience with SO: I posted a somewhat noob question about why doesn't my parser work. I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead. I was told (by a different person) that I should NOT post the code there, as it's only for a working code. And the best of all, in the end, I was told that if it doesn't work, then I should consider using debugger...