The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to.
Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" test where if you can't communicate or have no ability to think rationally about the words being typed there to solve problems, your question goes to the "dumb" section of the site.
point is, stop encouraging everyone to be programmers. You're slowing progress by doing so.
we've got 4.4 million questions, 90% of it from novices that should be asked not to program. you can go take a look at them, they are little better than "how is babby formed" type questions. These people are trying to program when they should be told that it's too hard.
You must be kidding. The worst thing about stackoverflow is not the naive questions but the obnoxious answers. Ask a question on SO, and the first priority of the Red Guards isn't to find an answer for you but to find a reason why your question doesn't even deserve an answer.
I've made good money over the decades as a programmer, but the technologies come and go like presidential administrations. I'm always a newbie at something. That's part of the fun. I'm always the guy who "doesn't know the difference between a variable and a browser" in something despite simultaneously serving on an "experts committee" in something else. I've lost count of the number of times I've spotted a "related question" on the SO sidebar while grazing for useful info, thought, Oh, yeah, what IS the answer to that one?, clicked it, and been informed by SO that they won't allow it to be answered because the question is "not constructive". Hunh?? The answer would have been constructive. Stopping people from answering a question that others are wondering about: THAT's what's not constructive.
Oh, but what if people are allowed to ask dumb questions, where dumb means questions that you already know the answer to? Well, then, it might be hard for you to find answers to your "smart" questions, right?
It sounds to me as though the solution is to worry less about dumb questions and more about the dumb search technology they have for matching incoming questions to their answers. With better technology than a bunch of tags and a 1980s-quality search engine, they wouldn't have to put so much effort into blocking questions and could put that effort into providing more answers.
I couldn't disagree more. It's very elitist to say that interested minds shouldn't pursue the field you're in because they're asking the wrong questions. The better and more productive approach would be to educate them by answering their question and at the same time pointing out the preferred way to look at it.
I know when I was first starting out there were obvious cliffs that I confronted when growing as a developer. The first cliff is going from syntax to understanding how to piece syntax together. Then further down the line is learning best practices and how more seasoned developers do things. This is something that you can only learn from practice and by asking questions on sites such as Stack Overflow and your peers. How else are you going to learn?
How did you learn programming? How did you learn about browsers and computers etc.?
Did you NEVER ask anybody any questions at the beginning?
You surely did. Why do you feel the need to keep the joy of programming just for yourself or just for the ones who came before now and learnt it a few years ago? Am I stealing your work when I learn programming? Do you absolutely HAVE to answer dumb questions on stackoverflow? You can just ignore the stuff you don't like, you know.
Users who have contributed to the SO community have the ability to close and delete questions. Just because you've got to a stage where these "dumb" questions seem obvious to you, doesn't mean they're not valid questions. You can tell them to improve their question or show that they've put some effort so that they understand that it's ultimately a Q & A site and not a code production service.
As for the stats, is it really that suprising that newcomers ask more questions? I'd imagine those who have been programming for some time are more confident in their ability to research answers, check the usual resources (e.g. MDSN), read and understand open source code, and then use SO as a form of last resort.
I had to ask seemingly "dumb" questions a lot when I started programming. I switched to software after having been a classical musician for many years and the transition in just learning a whole new world of vocabulary and how everything worked was pretty rough for about a year. Luckily, there were enough patient people to help me get through that and answer my questions. I wanted to learn to program pretty badly, I just didn't have the background to converse fluently right away.
Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" test where if you can't communicate or have no ability to think rationally about the words being typed there to solve problems, your question goes to the "dumb" section of the site.
point is, stop encouraging everyone to be programmers. You're slowing progress by doing so.
we've got 4.4 million questions, 90% of it from novices that should be asked not to program. you can go take a look at them, they are little better than "how is babby formed" type questions. These people are trying to program when they should be told that it's too hard.