There are some things that come easy to us, and some things that do not. For the times, when things aren’t easy, we ask questions to help us understand. Asking any question however isn’t always guaranteed to get you the answer you’re looking for, and might possibly leave you even more confused than you were before. It is important to be able to ask questions that others will respond to. I recall an often repeated saying from back in elementary school, “There are no dumb questions.” I do believe this; however I also do believe you can ask a question dumbly. In How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, Eric Steven Raymond outlines specifically how one should ask questions on various online forums. Out on the anonymous internet, hostility toward those who request help who do not deserve it can quickly turn a simple plea for help on its back. Asking questions are one of the fundamental keys to learning, it should be a priority that we learn how to ask them, especially when it comes to new forums. Stack Overflow is ‘the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.’ With 40 million visitors each month, and thousands of questions posted monthly, Stack Overflow has plenty of questions ranging from really good, to poor. Using Eric Steven Raymond’s extensive guide, we will analyze a couple questions asked on Stack Overflow and go into detail things that were done well, and some things that were done poorly.
Sorting the Stack Overflow list by votes, and making your way to the tail end, one can find oneself swamped with negatively voted questions. With so many to choose from, I’ve picked the most frustrating one I’ve come across. To start off, we have a question, or hardly that, by M01. He ‘asks’ Make this script work. There are two things obviously wrong with this question. First, it is not a question, but a demand. This goes against many sections in How To Ask Question The Smart Way including, ‘Don’t post homework questions’ but most importantly ‘Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps.’ Not only is his initial ‘request’ extremely, rude, in his detailed question this user comes off as arrogant with ‘Yes, I know how to do it with a for loop but that’s easy…’ and ‘And yes I have tried using “random.sample” but that has a problem with ints.’ This user is demanding help from users online all the while acting like a complete jerk. It is no surprise why this user received so many negative votes for this question. Luckily however, Henry was kind enough to provide an answer, all the while humbling the user, beginning his answer with ‘An obvious, and trivial, way of doing it…’ and closing with ‘I’ll choose not to post advice on asking people for help.’
Sorting through the best voted questions on Stack Overflow, we find a question asked by David Farinelli. He asks Why is it that parseInt(8,3) == NaN and parseInt(16,3) == 1?. This question hits several positive notes outlined by Raymond. His title is clear and concise, in his detailed question, he provides the source of his question, along with what specifically he is having trouble with outlined in bold text. He provides a screen cap of the particular section in the source material providing other users with quick access to the relevant material. He provides the answer that is confusing him, and specifically lays out his thought process in trying to interpret the problem. This great question demonstrates that David did his best to solve the problem on his own, only resorting to posting the question as a last resort, and in doing so, made sure the question was easy to read and understand. His politeness and well formulated question is answered with a polite and well formulated reply by T.J. Crowder. T.J. even throws in a little smiley face at the start of his reply making things a lot more fun for everyone involved.
It should be nothing new to anyone with a somewhat decent upbringing to understand how to properly ask a question to a stranger without being rude or impolite. The transition from asking a question in the real world vs online however can be somewhat understood, especially for those unfamiliar with the aggressiveness and sometimes unforgiving online communities. Based off these two extreme cases, however, it is clear that asking a good, well formulated question will provide you with the answer you wish for most of the time, whereas asking a not so good question, or in our case, demanding an answer will sometimes get you an answer, but also with the same attitude you brought with it. Treat others you’re asking for help with well, and they’ll return the favor.