this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I was always apprehensive about asking questions on any programming subreddits. If I got any help, it would be buried under dozens of “RTFM” comments, or worse comments that made me feel like I hadn’t earned my programming dues because I was asking for help rather than being clever enough to figure it out myself. The things that annoyed me about this type of response were firstly, why did the subreddit exist if not to help. And secondly I kept thinking about the young programmer who was starting out asking questions just being put off by the hostility.
Unfortunately it seems like every programming forum ends up like this in some respect - reddit just gets the most distilled hate-train version of it. It's a real bummer since much of the time teaching someone properly would take just as much time as being a jerk and it's just as fulfilling if you let it be.
You’re absolutely correct. I remember years ago I was stuck on a bit of VB script that was vital for my work and a guy basically rewrote my code and put passive aggressive comments like
//another person who thinks he’ll learn programming by getting somebody else to do all the work for him//
And this was all over my code, that i had struggled over for days. What annoyed me the most was my question was about a specific point in the code that was broken. I think of how much effort went into that answer.
Did the person even respond specifically what the question was about? I assume they re-wrote the program because they couldn't be bothered to explain a complicated exception.
I don't envy you from the past - VBA is difficult to write in a way that is both clean, easy to debug, and easy to maintain. We have some legacy VBA apps deployed at customers that just won't die.
He did answer the question - I can’t recall what the actual problem was. I’d taken some VB script written by an old colleague, that parsed a few thousand rows of data and had to do a number of things to it. There were a number of conditions that had to be met and then certain records were modified and sent to another spreadsheet where a mail merge was then set up to send out reports individually. I had no experience of VB, but worked my way through it and was stumped by an error that was being thrown half way through.
The most annoying thing about responses like this dude is that I had kind of liked solving this VB problem and I may well have stuck with it further. But being a little younger and less mellow I kind of solved the problem with his help and never looked at VB again. And to be clear, they didn’t rewrite the script, they just took the time to put comments up and down where things were done that were not going up to his standard. Imagine being a beginner coder having your code taken apart by an obviously experienced programmer sarcastically. Let’s just say I’m glad there’s a place here where I might be able to ask for help
Hmmm well this is one area that Reddit SHOULD be good at.
My experience was more with Linux, where people will go to Reddit not having a clue how to request help, and not bothering to join their distribution forum.
Sometimes the best answer is simply a link - like RTFM
Effort goes into answering repeated questions, writing guides etc.
So people expecting too much to be done for them can be slightly wearing... sometimes the best solution is actually for people requesting the help to learn to
entice people to help yourather than expect it as if it's their job.r/firefoxCSS was a good example of this - where people were keen to solve your problems.