Eric Raymond’s guide on “How to ask question the mart way” explains how to get help the right way. Many people often time ask for help the wrong way, getting hostile or arrogant responses without thinking why they were treated as such. To help people get the answers they’re looking for, and by extension helping the community get the right information, this guide was made to help ask question “the smart way.”
The outline of his guide is straight forwards, Eric Raymond explains the software community is largely volunteers, taking time to answer questions and thus do not like wasting time on low effort or time sink questions. Next, it goes over what should you do before you ask a question, such as trying to search the web, or searching the manual before attempting to ask the question. This step seems obvious, but many people just want the answer to their problems so in turn the community will usually call out lazy people because of this. In addition, when asking a community, it is important to also choose the right place. For example, when asking for help in a programming question, you want to be sure you post in the right section. You do not want to ask for in a section about say hardware design nor do you want to ask that same question in an area specialized in computer security. Also, when asking for help, try to make your title meaningful and specific the subject. Using “please help” or “I am lost” will only attract the ire of other people. In general, it also a good idea to ask question a clear, grammatical, correctly spelled language. Spending the extra effort to polish your language help everyone understands you clearly, even if English is not your first language, state that fact and you’ll still get helpful responses. Finally describe your problem, show what you did, what you expected vs what you got in chronological order and any attempt you did the solve the issues. Try to be very clear and include relevant information.
Stack overflow is a question and answer site intended for professional and enthusiast programmer. Much like social media platform like reddit, you can post questions to the board to get answer from the community, being mindful about following Eric Raymond’s guide to asking question the smart way. It is very commonly referenced by most programmer when they encounter a problem that other have solved previous. It is also the place where we will explore an example of asking question the smart way vs the not smart way.
This stack overflow question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57724907/unexpected-behavior-after-assignment-of-function-object-to-function-wrapper . It shows an idea what a smart message look. The author show a program written in C++ that is neatly written and asks about a behavior of the program, with one given result is what he expected but another result that seems similar to what he wrote giving a different answer while expecting the same result. The author also states his environment (using MinGW and Visual Studio 2019) so that others may follow his exact footstep. The author is clear that he doesn’t want a workaround but an explanation on what happening and the response on what was happening was object slicing in C++ and an an explanation how object slicing works.
My example of a question asked in a “not smart way” come from this post here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41711701/i-need-help-in-java-pyramid-code . From the title itself , it doesn’t have the correct grammar as I isn’t capitalized and break the rule of putting “I need help” in the subjects which turns off most people who would want to help. In the question, there are multiple simple grammar error such as “I need improvement in thos code. I got this output” and overall the impression I get is someone who doesn’t understand how to code attempting to get an answer from the community. This is a prime example of low effort question which even got a joke response of printing his expected result without actually using loops, which the author never clearly state that he need to use.
In conclusion, Mr. Raymond’s How To Ask Questions The Smart Way provides an excellent guide on how to ask question effectively by providing a few tips that help people understand what you’re really trying to ask and get useful responses. I hope by following the standards put fore in this document will help me in the future when I myself will need assistant on a topic I might not completely understand.