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by martin_a 2092 days ago
Pleae be nice to the 2374568234th user that could not manage to read any manual or just google for his error message before opening a new question!
1 comments

It's not always that simple. Half of the time when I run into errors, there's no one solution that either works or 100% applies to my case so it's a lot of trial and error. I'm also not the most skilled developer and manuals are often way too verbose and difficult to parse if they don't contain very clear examples.

Sometimes, we just need someone to help translate our needs into a different wording and everything clicks into place. I'm sure that this causes a lot of repeated questions, but that's why when someone links a relevant question, it might be enough to solve the issue.

I think a lot of people's frustration comes from questions where it's abundantly clear that the asker searched neither SO nor the web first.

It only takes a few dozens of "why is [insert programming language]'s {addition, multiplication, subtraction, division} broken?!?!" questions that are all pointed to What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating Point Numbers before you lose all faith in humanity and get cranky. It's quite understandable.

If you can take the time to make an SO account and write a title and question body, why not Google that title first?

Another class of almost offensive questions is exemplified by this question on the front page for me right now: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64087844/programming-tiv... . The user states what he wants, then completely useless debugging information, then a wall of code that in no way complies with the SO guidelines of reducing your code to a minimal working example, and finally an all-caps expression of personal feelings. Come on – nobody would feel sorry for someone acting like this in the real world. There are a few basic rules for social interactions.

Or, even more annoyingly, when you Google something and the first result is the exact problem you have, with the answer being someone pointing out that the solution can easily be found by googling...

People like you seem to forget that not only the question-asker profits from an answer, but future people as wel...

Did you consider looking at the other 1000s of results returned by Google?