Have I become intolerant of new forum members?

[Hack]

Miss quote is fine as long as you don't miss remember.

That is just under the bottom.

[techgnome]

I've heard that Miss Quote is quite horrible with dictation, nothing comes out quite right.

-tg

[Hack]

Speaking about not quite right, have you spoken with Miss Behaving lately.....

[boops boops]

Too busy trying to get Miss Informed to change her mind. Hopeless. Leaves me feeling Miss Understood ...

BB

[Powerstack]

Ok penagate --- I can say "lol" and mean it --- the "high five" made me laugh =)

[honeybee]

I joined way back when there was no Google, and it was either the MSDN or the forums such as VB Forums (which weren't many back then). Knowledge itself was so hard to come by it would have been foolish to ask for working code samples. Most of the times people graciously posted code from some real app they had developed and we adapted it, or there were some tutorials (I still remember John Percival's) explaining how a particular task could be accomplished.

Nowadays I suspect most people are used to ready-to-use things and don't want to spend time building something up themselves. This isn't as bad in itself as the loss of inquisitiveness. The more they are able to use readymade tools and code, the less they are interested to know how things work behind the scenes, the real interesting part.

Coming to the newbies here, it's difficult to make out if the person is genuinely looking for a working code sample so he can adapt it/learn from it, or if it's a school assignment delayed for some reason and we are indirectly helping them in it. I suggest to err on the generous side and help them out if you can't clearly say who deserves it and who doesn't.

.

[jmcilhinney]

@honeybee, as someone who also started programming before the web search engine days, although not as long before as some around here, it infuriates me that information is so easy to come by these days and yet so many people don't even make the slightest effort. How many people ask questions here without even a Google search and even when you tell them which type and member to use it's still "can you post an example" which really means "can you write my code for me so I don't have to try at all. I'm not intolerant of new forum members. I love it when someone asks a question and I say "use this member of this class" and they later post back that they looked it up and came up with their own solution and thanks for pointing them in the right direction but not actually doing the work for them. What I am intolerant of is lazy ingrates. Generation "Y should I bother" need a swift kick.

[FunkyDexter]

I'm sure that there were plenty of lazy programmers around "in my day"

Yeah, they just manifested differently. The number of guys I've worked with over the years who just used to copy lump of code from one part of the app and paste it into another part that was doing something vaguely similar without bothering to properly understand it first was truly terrifying. One of my team members once quipped that it wasn't code re-use but it was code recycling (to be fair, that guy was a good programmer who just had a rye sense of humour).

My personal bug bear isn't so much the people who ask lazy questions, I'm generally quite philosophical about that and often mildly amused by the steam coming out of the responders ears. What chaps my ass is the folks who ask a question, get an answer and then completely disregard it and proudly anounce they're going to do something utterly stupid. I'm reminded of a poster (who I shall decline to name) who asked why he was getting an error trying to insert a value into an identity column. The reasons and how to handle it (just don't insert into that column) were thoroughly explained. His response was to proudly announce that he was going to flip the identity_insert property on. You could practically hear the collective jaws of the forum hit the keyboards. A flood of responses saying "Err, are you sure? That sounds like a really bad idea to me" followed, some in full capitals, but he was not to be derailed from his diabolical scheme. I haven't hear that database is corrupt yet but it's surely only a matter of time.

[Shaggy Hiker]

(to be fair, that guy was a good programmer who just had a rye sense of humour).

I would wryly suggest that this quote is ambiguous: It's just too clever to parse.

[formlesstree4]

It's bad when I have to google 3 out of 15 words in Shaggy's post.

This tickled my laughing muscle.

[FunkyDexter]

I would wryly suggest that this quote is ambiguous

Ya know, even as I typed it I thought, "that doesn't look right", but couldn't for the life of me think what was wrong with it. Actually, scratch that, it was a deliberate pun meant to imply he drank too much. Yep, that was defintely it.

It's bad when I have to google 3 out of 15 words in Shaggy's post

Shaggy's I can just about cope with, it's the mangled txt spk posts that get me. LOL ROFL IS.

[techgnome]

Pffft! I've seen far, far worse... some even since this thread was started... I've tried to refrain from linking to them in this thread... at least he said he'd try it... I've seen others that continue to go "I cant get it work, can u jud giv me cod?"

-tg

[techgnome]

cheesse and crackers... I jsut had another one of those "can you explain that and give me examples" posts...(the context was that I suggested that the OP might want to use SQLCEClient instead of SQLClient to connect to his sdf file, rather than looking it up, he asks for examples) ... it's almost a shame the internet exists... these people would have been weeded out in the days of book references... *GASP!* Read? a BOOK?! hehehe... I wonder if maybe my next referenced material should be an actual book. "For an example see Mastering Visual Basic, Chapter 4, page 256... the section on ....."

-tg

[thebuffalo]

cheesse and crackers... I jsut had another one of those "can you explain that and give me examples" posts...(the context was that I suggested that the OP might want to use SQLCEClient instead of SQLClient to connect to his sdf file, rather than looking it up, he asks for examples) ... it's almost a shame the internet exists... these people would have been weeded out in the days of book references... *GASP!* Read? a BOOK?! hehehe... I wonder if maybe my next referenced material should be an actual book. "For an example see Mastering Visual Basic, Chapter 4, page 256... the section on ....."

-tg

Or just give them one of these

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Mastering+Visua...+4%2C+page+256

[formlesstree4]

Or just give them one of these

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Mastering+Visua...+4%2C+page+256

I love everything about that site.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Really??!?!?!?!? Somebody made a comment about the number of books you had? I grew up with so many books we didn't have places for them all. I'd go to a used bookstore near my house and return with large boxes of books. They weren't necessarily my books, or anybodies. I certainly didn't haul them all off to college with me (where would I put them?), but that was largely because my parents had more space.

[thebuffalo]

I'm not going to lie, every time I pick up a book, I end up falling asleep. Something about reading and it on being on screen just doesn't intrigue me. Maybe it's because I'm a part of the next generation, all that public school lunch and what not.

[techgnome]

As long as I am working... there will never be a such thing as a completely paperless office... I will find things to print... documents and/or reference materials.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

As long as I am working...there will never be such a thing as a neat office.

I'm fine with reading on screen and editing on screen, but for serious reading, I much prefer a book. They don't take batteries, and they don't put me to sleep. Both of those features make them ideal for taking to the woods, or sailing. In fact, when sailing, I generally carry a good library with me, because sailing teaches patience.

@dday9: My tastes are the same as yours, though when you say war and history, they are practically the same. Most history seems to be about some war or another. At first I was heavily into the US Civil War and WW II. I then started branching to WW I, and now I pretty much grab whatever looks interesting from absolutely anywhere in the world and any time period.