Re: Flame retardant
Re: Flame retardant
- Subject: Re: Flame retardant
- From: Andy Lee <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 01:47:49 -0400
At 11:00 PM -0400 5/23/02, Erik J. Barzeski wrote:
On 5/23/02 10:01pm, Roy Lovejoy <email@hidden> wrote:
The person asked an honest question.. they didn't ask to be lectured..
Why is it that some people fail to understand that such "honest questions"
waste the time of people, even if all they have to do is hit "delete"?
This is an opt-in public mailing list. If you subscribe to it, find
too many "wasteful" postings for your liking, and keep subscribing to
it, you're wasting your own time. That's hardly the fault of people
who ask beginner questions.
It may be that the list's purpose and audience are too broad. Maybe
there should be a "cocoa-dev-expert" list? I think that would
address a lot of the issues, especially as the Cocoa-using population
grows. Just a thought.
Or should I be allowed to ask any on-topic question so long as it's
"honest," regardless of where else I might find the information without
bothering developers who have seen 199 other people ask the same question in
the previous 18 months.
Yes. You absolutely should, and so should anybody else. Asking a
question that Erik Barzeski has seen 200 times is not in itself list
abuse.
Experienced teachers hear the same questions over and over. See,
that's what "experienced" means: it means you've done a lot of
something.
> Many times, due to the dearth/organization of Apple's
documentation, it's hard
to know where the 'TFM' is before one can 'R' it..
I'm tired of seeing this as a reason. Cocoa documentation has not a single
"description forthcoming,"
The class docs don't have it any more, but there are still some
"forthcomings" in TasksAndConcepts. Took me 5 seconds to find using
MTLibrarian. Please, RTFM before posting!
Sarcasm aside, I agree the Cocoa documentation is extremely helpful
once you know your way around, especially if you get tools like
MTLibrarian <
http://www.montagetech.com/> and Cocoa Browser
<
http://homepage.mac.com/hoshi_takanori/cocoa-browser/>.
There's NO dearth. And with a search engine (hey, even Help Viewer has one)
there is no real lack of organization.
It is possible to get lost in any large, complex, unfamiliar system,
even a well-organized one.
I'm all for helping newbies,
Every naive, ill-formed, "duh" question is a perfect opportunity to
show someone how they could have found the answer on their own. In
other words, a perfect opening for helping a "newbie."
But it's also a challenge. Part of the challenge is to figure out
the best way to help each individual that you choose to answer
(emphasis on "choose"). Sometimes they ask about X, but they're
*really* asking about Y and just don't know it because they never
heard of Y, or they got a bad explanation somewhere else. So you
have to figure out, perhaps by asking questions of your own, what the
real question is. Some people find this challenge fun, not a waste
of time. But admittedly it's not for everyone.
but sometimes "tough love" is what's needed to
get a better programmer in the end.
I don't know the exact origin of the term, but I'm pretty sure "tough
love" came from a program that was a last-ditch attempt to reform
hardcore juvenile delinquents -- repeat violent offenders. That's
not how I see a person who joins this list and asks how to get a C
string from an NSString. I see that person as a new person in my
neighborhood asking for directions, and I try to treat them as such.
If they abuse the courtesy (and asking the original question is not
abuse) then I deal with that at the time. But most people are okay.
Personally, I'm skeptical when someone says they're being harsh for
my own good. I see the "tough" part; I just don't see the "love"
part.
I said my last post was my last, and I
guess I lied... Hopefully I won't this time.
It's a hard promise to keep, on a thread as provocative as this. I
had told myself I wouldn't chime in, and look what happened.
--Andy
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