On Thu, 03 Oct 2013 09:01:29 +0200, Antoon Pardon wrote:
> You don't
> follow the principle of treating others in the way you hope to be
> treated if you were in their shoes.
[...]
> Suppose you develop a new
> interest in which you are now the newbie and you go to a newsgroup or
> forum where as a nebie you ask a poor question. Are you hoping they will
> answer with sarcasm? I doubt that very much.
Then you would be wrong. You don't know me very well at all.
If I asked a dumb question -- not an ignorant question, but a dumb
question -- then I hope somebody will rub my nose in it. Sarcasm strikes
me as a good balance between being too namby-pamby to correct me for
wasting everyone's time, and being abusive.
An ignorant question would be:
"I don't understand closures, can somebody help me?"
or even:
"I wrote this function:
def f(arg=[]):
arg.append(1); return arg
and it behaves strangely. Is that a bug in Python?"
This, on the other hand, is a dumb question:
"I wrote a function to print prime numbers, and it didn't work. What did
I do wrong?"
In the last case, the question simply is foolish. Short of mind-reading,
how is anyone supposed to know which of the infinite number of errors I
made? In this case, I would *much* prefer a gentle, or even not-so-
gentle, reminder of my foolishness via a sarcastic retort about looking
in crystal balls or reading minds, than either being ignored or being
abused.
And quite frankly, although I might *prefer* a gentle request asking for
more information, I might *need* something harsher for the lesson to
really sink in. Negative reinforcement is a legitimate teaching tool,
provided it doesn't cross the line into abuse.
--
Steven
--
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