We are constantly learning about new things everyday whether they’re complex mathematical equations or simple cooking recipes. Throughout the process of learning, we are bound to get stuck somewhere and will eventually have to ask questions to guide us to the right direction. Asking questions is part of the essentials of learning something new. Over the course of my life, I have faced many obstacles that I would have never been able to get over alone. There were countless moments where I have struggled to figure something out and ultimately needed to seek for help from my peers. In order for me to understand and learn things, I must struggle through it first and try every method that would lead me closer to the solution. Once I have exhausted all my options, only then would I ask questions to hopefully guide me to the solution. Learning how to ask proper smart questions is crucial to my learning experience and respectful to other people’s time and consideration.
The question linked below is a bad example of how questions should be asked. This user showed signs of laziness and no interest in attempting to fix the problem itself. According to the guidelines from Eric Raymond’s essay “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way,” this person did exactly what Raymond had said not to do. The question was about this person’s syntax errors; there was no specific topic he wanted to ask about, it was just about why he is getting these syntax errors. To add insult to injury, this person also just pasted an entire block of code and the entire error log. Upon closer examination, you could see that most of his errors could be located and solved by reading and follow the debug statements. It seemed like this person gave off a sense of laziness by not wanting to debug his own code himself and asking others to do it for him. This question provides no benefit to the community and is simply wasting people’s time; it is a prime example of someone just taking from the community and not giving back.
Source: StackOverflow-WhereAreMySyntaxErrors
On the other hand, this question linked below shows an example of a good question to ask. This question closely follows the guidelines of Eric Raymond’s “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way” by being precise and informative, displaying knowledge about the subject, and showing that they are asking because they are interested in the subject. It is a clear, concise question about why a sorted array is processed faster than an unsorted array. This person has shown that he had attempted to figure out the problem himself by testing it in different language thinking that it might be a language related issue thus further displaying his interest in the subject. The question they asked made it seem like they wanted to know more about the subject, not because it was part of their homework assignment that was due, but because they wanted to learn and satisfy their curiosity about it. The question wasn’t an extremely specific and personal programming issue thus the answer was very informative, and everyone could benefit from it.
Source: StackOverflow-SortedArraysAreFasterAtProcessing
Questions are a very important way of expressing your interests about a topic. Whenever I go and ask questions, I always take into consideration other people’s time; I ask myself if my question is worth their time answering, and if I had tried hard enough to figure it out myself. Asking questions is essential to learning something however you have to struggle through it and try it yourself first, not immediately giving up and having someone else do your dirty work. By asking smarter questions, everyone else can benefit from it instead of just you, and it doesn’t waste anyone else’s time when answering them.
Source: Eric-Raymond’s-Essay