> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way.
Then you have to do two things in your answer:
1. Correctly answer the question as asked.
2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.
If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."
Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?
> Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?
You know that's not your responsibility. If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
And frankly, I think you greatly overestimate how valuable and essential your non-responsive "you're asking the wrong question" answer is.
>That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.
Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
Put another way - when was the last time you used a development tool, or a library, or some other resource, and sat down to read the full documentation of it? I would posit that that's very rare as an activity, even for developers who need to develop a deep understanding of what they're using.
It's much more common to learn by doing, and the limit of that learning is very often what the developer can't do. Answers which easily enable developers to do something are overwhelmingly likely to lead to developers doing that thing - much in the same way that a long page of library documentation which gives an example is likely to lead to developers repeating that example, even if at the end of the docs, there's a little caveat saying that you shouldn't follow the example for so-and-so reason.
>If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
But is it a good experience? Sure, maybe they'll learn that they always have to read the whole answer before they use any part of it. But we sensibly have abandoned this no-guardrails approach to teaching in almost every arena where it's been used, because it's not really suited to the way people do things in real life - and in real life, people often end up affecting others with their mistakes.
Does junior developer who learns how to glue SQL strings together in their favourite programming language, and makes the "small mistake" of not learning anything about SQL injection in the process, benefit from the learning experience when they cause a data leak? Do their customers? Or should the learning resources they access maybe use the pedagogical tools available to make sure those kinds of mistakes are really hard to make, even if it occasionally inconveniences a seasoned pro?
> Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
The are a lot of different kinds of "users," and I think the kind of thinking in that article is totally inappropriate when applied to developer Q&A board.
To be perfectly blunt: the result if what you're advocating is to condescendingly treat experienced people as newbies so dumb that their question should not be answered, because you think they're so dumb the real answer might distract them from the lecture you want to condescendingly give them.
People like that are super annoying and almost always unhelpful.
Every single fucking question I ask on SO has some lazy condescending dude chiming in to answer the easy question he thinks I should have asked, after he totally failed to understand the constraints that made my question hard. Of course, lazy condescending dude always thinks he knows better.
Then you have to do two things in your answer:
1. Correctly answer the question as asked.
2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.
If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."