Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out.
Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten.
If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might.
The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork.
I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way.
This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.
And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.
Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
(The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)
As for checking a reference, I knew that "column buckling" was a thing. Before I studied it, I didn't know the concept even existed, and would have no idea how to look up something I didn't even know existed or what it might be called.
> Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history?
How are you going to understand WW1 without knowing who Ludendorff was? I know that if you don't know names and dates and events, you cannot have a mastery of history. You don't have any framework to hang analysis or understanding on.
> Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions
Nobody does that. But I will say that if you can't name any of them, I guarantee you don't know squat about C.
> and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
I wonder how many C experts you know can't answer a question about what a pointer is.
Lots of passing of tests from short-term memorization that's then promptly forgotten.