[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
Maybe I was biased because I read Eric Raymonds nice text about
"How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"
some days before.
Its hard enough being new as is, there is just so much information, and so
much of it you either need experience or have someone experienced in order
to learn it. Perhaps I am biased in that I don't have anyone experienced to
help me (ruby talk _is_ my users' group), which makes learning that much
more difficult. I read a lot of books, watch a lot of screencasts, try a lot
of ideas, fail a lot, try again, fail again, try again, until I eventually
hit the "oh" point where I understand the concept well enough that it
actually makes sense.
There probably are lots of losers (a word the smart-questions article enjoys
synonymizing with newbies), but there are also a lot of people like me, who
are just overwhelmed by their ignorance, and maybe don't even know what the
right question is, or why their question is bad or doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I figure if an instructor wanted me to gather information about a
language, I would think that addressing the language's community newsgroup
would be a good resource -- who would know better? So I would be surprised
to have them tell me I was trying to slack off.
Anyway, I hate the smart-questions article, it reminds me of all the
assholes who hang out in the bash irc channel, they won't help you figure
out the simple obvious problem that they could solve in one line, until
you've been humiliated for a half hour or so. Getting an answer there is an
exercise in tenacity and humility. Aside from the "it wasn't me, it was the
Asperger's", the article just reeks of bully on a playground. The advice to
observe lists for days before posting just shows its all about who is king
of the hill, better respecting their turf, and even though the premise of
the advice is that your question is perfect, you shouldn't just ask, or
you'll get clobbered by the breadth of their egos.
So, I try to help people newer than me out as often as possible. And may the
gods bless Stack Overflow (though, questions like this aren't particularly
well received there, either).
