Questions, questions, questions. Everyone have them, from the simpliest why repeated on end to more thoughts provoking like what is the meaning of life. Questions are help people learn, clearing up confusions and manage misinformations. However not every single questions are useful. There are questions out there that doesn’t have any benefits since it doesn’t ignite inspirations. There are smart questions and there are dumb questions, to paraphrase Eric Raymond’s “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” a smart question would be a detailed question straight to point question after already doing some research. These type of question are important to smart software engineer because it get them thinking on how to solve this puzzle and from a computer technician standpoint it narrows down the problem so I don’t have to search the entire internet. Here are two examples, one of a dumb question and another of what I think was kind of smart.
Following Raymond’s guide, I dive into Stack Overflow looking for a smart and a dumb question. Starting with the dumb question, I found one labeled “How do you write an line of output?” I clicked on it and was prompted with what I believed was a troll question. All it asked was how to output “Hello World”, the poster stated it was a class assignment and asked please help at the end. Needless to say we can all agree that this question was pretty dumb. There wasn’t much information at all, it showed that they didn’t take any time to google this or even read their assignment. I dont think they even paid attention in class. There were some answers to this question, just some basic code. There wasn’t anything useful to learn from this question except for try searching online first.
This other question I found also have a simple title “How does the “this” keyword work?”, it caught my interest seeing as how it had a lot of positive votes. The poster clearly did their research first before asking this. They stated that there doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation, how it’s used in JavaScript on Stack Overflow, and the strange behaviour. This shows that this wasn’t a spur of the moment question, they probably look through a bunch of JavaScript questions and ponder on why
this
was used. The question not only asked for a base definition but examples of when it should be used, it’s helping other people that are new to JavaScript have a better understanding of
this
. The answers given were also top notch, The first one gave a link to a reading about scope that ties in to the topic then follow up with code examples and explainations on why the code is. there were so much material to learn from and other links for further readings. The second answer had more examples with other functions. While the question was a simple one the way it was posed was smart. It didn’t get scuffed at unliked the preivous one.
Smart questions aren’t really about the subject asked but the way the question was posed. For instance I could just ask what is quantum mechanics a seemly intelligent subject but the way I asked doesn’t lead to deep thoughts, it leads to me being told to go google it. With the amount of information at the palms of our hand, we should look through it first before having someone spoon fed us the answers.
Read Eric Raymond’s guide here
The not so smart question here
The smart question here