No Stupid Questions, only Stupid Askers

12 Sep 2019

When it comes to asking questions, there are a lot of good ones and bad ones in the realm of information technology. The website StackOverflow is one of the best resources anywhere for programming solutions outside of a textbook and documentation. When using it to get information, you have to ask good questions in order to get the answers you need. Bad questions rarely get any answers. An example of a good question to ask would be one that asks how to enumerate an enum in C# (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/105372/how-do-i-enumerate-an-enum-in-c ). The question keeps it simple and clearly states the goal of the question in the title. In the body of the question, it displays the code being used and the compile-time error “’Suit is a ‘type’ but is used like a ‘variable’” for clarification on what is going wrong. Because of that, the answers are precise and helpful. It may be simple, but it’s still a relatively good question. One of the more downvoted questions on the sites was basically asking “why is my C# code not working?” (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39197530/why-is-my-c-sharp-code-not-working ) and nothing else. The question, while it did have the code in question, it didn’t specify anything else. No errors are specified in the question, nor did the asker specify what the code is actually supposed to do. One of the comments sums it up best: “Because your code has multiple problems, and you didn’t specify exactly what the problem is, you now end up with multiple answers, all addressing different problems with your code.”