Skip to main content

Being Helpful by Not Answering Questions

As some of my readers (I have readers?) may know, I am a frequent of #python over at Freenode. A great place. One of the most supportive IRC channels I have ever been a member of. Over the years I have been a frequent member of this channel, I have received an awful lot of help. It is where I went when I first decided to learn Python, and the kind folks there did great things to guide me along. I learned and I stayed, because I still need some good minds to knock ideas around with, and figure things out. I also stayed because the best way I can repay the help I received is to return it to others who seek just that.

I want to think my help is appreciated. I happen to know it is. There is an increasing number of regulars, learning their way through, who explicitly seek me for help, send me entire projects to look over, and generally befriend me in response to the advice I give them. I try not to think highly of myself, but I do believe I am valuable to that channel and that many others would agree.

A few, however, seem to hate my guts. A growing minority of users are continually harassing me over my methods of giving advice. They have a problem with how I talk to people that ask simple questions, even with those people not being them and happily taking my advice over the complaints of these few difficult IRC'ers. What they seem to have a problem with is my tendency to answer questions with questions, investigate why someone thinks they want to do what they ask how to do, and suggesting other ways to reach their goals that may be better than what they came seeking.

This is not a technique of myself alone. Python has a strong community of developers with strong opinions. It is not unusual for people to ask about threads and be told that Twisted, separated processes, or Stackless is better. If someone asks how to set a variable with a name in some string, they aren't told about globals() and locals(), but to use a dictionary instead, and usually will be given a small talk about how all variables exist in dictionary, including the globals and locals, so there is no overhead in this and its a perfectly good thing to do.

People aren't given a gun to shoot themselves with. They are given advice not in answering their question directly, but delving into the source of the question and solving the problems that lead to their asking a question, although sometimes misconceived.

Is it wrong to assume you know someone shouldn't do what they ask how to do, and tell them something else instead? Does anyone have the right to insult and verbally abuse those who practice such techniques of helping others?

Does anyone have thoughts on this? Lending a hand is important, so we should be doing it right.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I say keep on trucking as you are.
Matt Davies said…
I'm trying to access the freenode python chat room for the first time, but my IRC client is stalling.

It's telling me I need to be identified to join the channel?

I'm on a macosx 10.4.8 using Conversation 2.14

You haven't seen this issue before have you my friend?
Matt Davies said…
I think I know.

I need to register my nickname

That's another quesiton :-)
Anonymous said…
I only spent one evening in the python channel. I was insulted for a good 30 minutes for wanting to use threads as a limited form of concurrency. They kept offering processes (which didn't offer interactive responses at the time on all platforms), or async programming (was not possible with the system I was asked to maintain). I was asking because I was getting segfaults, and I decided that I'd rather fight with my problem than to be insulted because I had a question.

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro