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A comment on 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds. Parent comment

Re:25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds by Stratoscope on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @01:55AM (#19561095)
> You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore.

I resemble that remark!

It was just yesterday that I was looking up a bit of JavaScript trivia, how to format a number rounded to some number of decimal places.

Yeah, I'm supposed to be some kind of JavaScript expert, so I could have done the obvious "mdn tofixed", right?

But I was working on a Google Maps API project and typed in the first thing that popped into my mind:

https://www.google.com/search?q=six+digit+decimal+place+goog...

And you know what? It took me straight to my own Stack Overflow answer where I explained how to do this, either preserving or removing any trailing zeroes.

Who needs to remember things when you have a service like that? ;-)

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Re:25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds by golergka on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @05:48AM (#19562057)
I don't think that you're and author of parent comment are talking about the same thing. Most of low-quality questions on SO that make you think that author is lazy and unqualified are not about trivia or API bits like that. They're about a medium-level task that could be decomposed into more elementary subtasks without the need to know anything specific about the language or framework - but the author didn't even do that.

Following your example, it wouldn't be a question about formatting a number. It would be a question where the user would ask something along the lines of, "how do I write an app that calculates user's effective tax rate?". If someone is not able to decompose this at least to the level of "take input, process it, calculate it, present output" and then ask questions about each of those individual steps, or linking them together - then, in my opinion, he is stupid. (At least in the field of computer programming.)

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Re:25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds by nkrisc on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:45AM (#19562839)
Agreed. This is a thinking problem not even a programming problem. That question could be answered without a single line of code. Of course what the asked was probably looking for was all the code necessary, written for them.
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Re:25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds by arendtio on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:50AM (#19561828)
Yeah, I love the feeling when end up with your own answers... You feel so stupid that you didn't remember, but also happy that you wrote that answer back in the day ;-)
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