Ask Smart to Become Smarter
09 Sep 2021
Why Ask Smart Question?
Computer programming has become more doable in recent years. People easily learn how to code from YouTube channels and use free code editors (e.g., JSFiddle) to play around with it. The problem occurs when they are stuck with their code. In the programming world, there are various forums or communities to ask questions, and those questions are mostly welcomed by the users. They are glad to help those who are having a problem with their code because they also learn from the good questions. However, many people throw some not intelligent questions, and usually, it gets ignored by the experts. Why is it? It is because it is not a valuable question to answer.
According to Eric Steven Raymond,
…throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.
Intelligent Question vs Unintelligent Question
The smart question is simple. Before asking a question, we need to try to find an answer regarding our code. We can always search for the issue that we are having on the internet. The most significant part before asking a question is – we must try to run the code first. For instance, “Date Range adjustment in java” is an unintelligent question that scored -3 votes. This question only states how to get the solution using a loop, and this person did not provide any code. We can assume that this question wants only the solution to get the right output. This person did not try to search on the internet and did not even try to write a code.
On the other hand, this “Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?” question is considered as a smart question. It contains the codes that the person was working and clearly explained the problem that was occurring. As a result, this question got 25813 votes with 27 answers from others. The well explained details provided clear understanding of the question, and the person was able to get the valuable answers.
Overall
When I was learning Java from previous classes, I was the one who was asking unintelligent questions. I usually put my code on the monitor and saying, “My code is not working. Can you help me?” This was a stupid way to ask a question because I was not learning from it. I could have asked a smarter way and could learn more efficiently. Oftentimes I did not learn efficiently from my TA who corrected my code. Since I realized how to ask smarter questions, I often get the solutions from the internet. I ask myself what is the meaning of the error and what do I want to do with my code. After questioning myself, I search the error code and read few similar problems. I did learn more efficiently by doing this learning strategy. It helped me to understand the functions in-depth by reading the definitions and examples from the internet.