[chongli]

Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising?

It's only patronizing to people who are motivated self-learners, such as you. To people who are unmotivated and/or struggling with the concepts (such as high school students), it works better than most other styles I've tried.

I've spent a lot of time tutoring high school and elementary school students. Many of them are so frustrated that they just want you to give them the answer. But then if you do they write it down and declare "problem solved." In the long run, students who continually weasel the answers out of their tutors end up far, far behind those who work with a Socratic teacher and are persuaded to try to think of the answers for themselves.

[narag]

The problem here is that this is a piece of opinion, presented as a lesson, implying that the author is the master and the readers the apprentices.

[avmich]

Can author imply anything else? If reader knows better, why reader reads at all? Actually, before reading nobody can know what's in the writing, so author is naturally more knowledgeable.

Lesson is just a transfer of knowledge - which may turn out to be useless, but only after the fact.

[narag]

Can author imply anything else?

Of course.

If reader knows better, why reader reads at all?

Because the reading, as you yourself said:

...may turn out to be useless, but only after the fact.

I don't find it wrong, just irrelevant.

Oh, and using "data structure" to mean a "struct" is annoying for us old farts that learned the standard meaning, it's causing people to get confused. Actually, since classes are a data structures (in the old sense), the very title sounds like nonsense.

Nothing too bad, every day people does much worse in the Internet, but add the μαιευτικη´ and it comes out as inappropiate.

[gowld]

The author could acknowledge the trade-offs between their preference and anothers.

[evancordell]

Is there a difference between using the Socratic method interactively and transcribing a socratic discourse that never occurred?

[chongli]

A huge difference. Interactively, you can both ask and answer questions and you can steer the dialogue toward the pupil's areas of ignorance.

As a form of writing, you're left to guess at what your pupil might be thinking. Apart from Plato, few people have ever managed to succeed at this.

[abecedarius]

Plato succeeded if you judge by his historical rep, but I can't stand the guy, for reasons not entirely unlike the complaint starting this thread. Though good dialogs do exist (I like Raymond Smullyan's).

[nercht12]

Plato didn't imagine his audience to be idiots. He really debated with himself or with questions he'd probably heard other people actually make (since he was with lots of other philosophers). He's harder to appreciate if you don't think like him or his companions and thus don't follow his line of thought.

In a way though, Plato tries to tell a story rather than blabber away facts. It allows for the introduction of stupid or "less-intelligent" questions rather than setting up obvious straw men.

.02