Sure, but they didn't have to be dicks about it. They could have said "we don't want to tell you if it won't teach you anything" and I'd have left. Berating me wasn't very productive.
> fact probably could not do so without sacrificing a great deal.
It was a "you're using sprintf("%d") when you need sprintf("%u")" sort of thing. Not exactly that, but very easy.
> it's rather like going to a math tutor with your homework
Not really, given that I don't ever work with C. It's more like asking for help with a flat tire and having the person say "I will ask you questions until you figure out how to do it". Thanks, but I just want to get to my job interview on time.
> the folks answering questions still require a certain amount of buy-in
I had done all the debugging I could and narrowed it down to that specific line, but doing anything more would require reading a large amount of material (which I didn't know where to find) on the intricacies of the C standard/compiler/etc, so it wasn't like I just went in saying "help me I don't remember the for loop syntax".
> a refusal to help when someone just wants a quick answer doesn't sound unreasonable, and in fact may be all that holds their community together.
I doubt that's what holds a community together, and I agree that it's not unreasonable. However, the way they treated me was.
A lot of people show up in programming communities asking for help with their intro programming homework. Once you see a few dozen of those, it's understandable if your knee-jerk reaction is at least somewhat insulting.
I'm almost certain that this anecdote arises purely due to the structure of the forum in which the question was asked, and has very little bearing on the vitriol and malice (or lack thereof) present in the denizens of #C.
Refusing to provide direct answers is #programminglanguage in general, otherwise you can just be helping a stream of beggars.
It sounds like #C has chosen as its mission to teach people the C programming language. To that end, they see it as a derailment of their existential purpose to help people who "just want the trivial fix." To them, it's rather like going to a math tutor with your homework and saying "I don't want to know how to do it, I just want the answer." Correctly or incorrectly, they think that helping you in the way that you ask won't teach you anything, and that it will ultimately hurt you on the final.
Even among communities whose mission is to help people with specific questions, like StackOverflow, the folks answering questions still require a certain amount of buy-in: evidence that you've thought about the question enough to understand precisely what the problem is, and evidence that the problem doesn't have an easily found solution on Google. Without that buy-in, the social environment they've set up will inevitably devolve until it's really difficult to separate the genuine difficulties that can be solved from the white noise of people asking the same question over and over.
So while I wouldn't defend the people in #C wholesale, and there may be plenty of vitriol there, a refusal to help when someone just wants a quick answer doesn't sound unreasonable, and in fact may be all that holds their community together.