[iherbig]

The problem, I believe, with this line of thinking is that at a beginner level one simply does not know what to Google. You need a certain foundation to be able to simplify the problem down to a few key words. You need to understand the problem you're having on some level that beginners simply don't.

And I think it's a fairly elitist attitude that's prevalent in programming that leads people to treat the field as if there is some innate quality that makes for a good programmer that we want to filter for. It's a similar fallacy that leads people to believe that they're "just not good at math," I think.

[zo1]

SO should not be the point they start, then. They need some sort of mentoring/tutoring service, or start with a low-level beginner Online Course to help them learn the terms.

Once they have that under their belt, their knowledge/experience has been "bootstrapped" enough such that they know what they don't know, or where they need help, etc.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's not helpful if those things aren't available or easy to find - which, for most beginners, they aren't.

(An online course in what, exactly? Web design? C? JavaScript? Scratch? CS fundamentals? "Coding"?)

The SO approach is just nasty - unforgivably so, IMO.

SO could at least have split into abs. beginner/more experienced beginner/journeyman/professional/expert levels.

Currently it just seems to provide an excuse for not very interesting people to bully beginners instead of helping them.

[Latty]

This is a fairly well known problem for SO (see people trying to explain a question about the ternary operator - a name you only learn after you first try to find out what it is - in any language where it's all symbols).

SO does account for this though. Questions can (and regularly are) closed as 'already answered'. Those questions then link through. This means that all those questions hang around as pointers with all the ways of describing the issue people tried, hopefully increasing the search term surface area.

[Godel_unicode]

I think there's a world of difference between the existential question of "what is a programmer" and the concrete question of "should SO allow yet another list comprehensions syntax question".

There exists a category of programmer who has so little knowledge that SO is not the place for them. They can be, should be, and are directed to Google and the documentation.

[iherbig]

I think you may have misunderstood me if you boiled down my point to an existential question.

My point was that directing to Google or documentation is a basic misunderstanding (or simple forgetfulness) of what it means to be a beginner in the field. It is that telling someone to "Google it" or "read the docs" fails to understand the fact that beginners often simply can't comprehend documentation and can't use Google effectively because they do not have the foundation necessary to understand the problem they are facing.

This isn't an existential question of "what is a programmer." It's the statement that if SO is exclusive to "beginners" then it is doing the field a disservice. And it's a statement that directing beginners to Google or documentation is elitist and inherently exclusionary in practice.

[Latty]

I think that the people behind SO have weighed up the pros and cons - a million questions about the most basic parts of a language are not that helpful to anyone but the person asking, and are better answered in the context of a tutorial or whatever. Generally those kinds of super-beginner questions are not useful without context, so they get either a useless answer or a small tutorial that doesn't really work because it's on SO.

Expecting people to be able to learn a language from nothing by going on SO and asking questions just isn't going to work well. It'll burn out answerers and fill the site with mostly useless content. I respect the decision made by the SO guys to focus the site and avoid that, because a useful resource for one group is better than a bad resource for everyone.