Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us (2019)
by ncmncm on Monday April 26, 2021 @12:33AM
(#26939262)
Bjarne Stroustrup is a Director at Morgan-Stanley, a major investment bank in New York where software difficulties may cost millions of dollars per minute. He has described his workday as people coming to him with a difficult software engineering problem, about which he asks increasingly detailed questions until light dawns, and they go away ready to re-write the badly designed subsystem causing the trouble.
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Often, just the act of explaining your problem to someone results in possible answers. (see Rubber Duck Debugging https://rubberduckdebugging.com)
When using a "rubber duck" I think you just force yourself to turn loose thoughts into coherent ideas by having to express them clearly. This can reveal some problems that were not apparent before the idea was expressed. It's a "rubber duck" because it's really just a monologue and an inanimate object could do the job of the listener.
What's described above seems more like Socratic questioning, where a person asks questions that reveal facets of an idea that the person being asked may not have considered, thereby prompting the asked to rethink their assumptions and draw new conclusions.