As I have spent the first two years of college online I’ve learned that it is not always easy to communicate questions. An essay called How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Steven Raymond breaks down how to ask smart questions. This essay explains the etiquettes of good questions and outside of etiquettes what can make a question bad. It also breaks down the effects of good questions. To make it easier to understand smart questions and how to ask smart questions I found an example of a smart question and a question that may be considered not as smart so it is easier to articulate questions.
A good example of a “smart” question is a question from Stack overflow titled “ Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array? “. This user has an interesting question which has to do with the computing time of an algorithm. They found that sorting data before the timed region caused the code to loop quicker. They showed the code that they are using which is very important so others can actually see what they are trying to fix. The code starts off with generating an array and then sorts the array, it then ends off calculating the elapsed time. The user found that if they take out the part of the code that sorts the array the elapsed time is longer which they found strange. They thought that it may have been the language and tried to switch over to Java when they were originally using c++ and found that the results were the same but not as extreme. This user did an excellent job of asking a smart question as they showed their findings and attempts of trying to find the answer, this is important as this saves the people answering the question the time of suggesting an answer that the user has already attempted. In coding there are a lot of possibilities on why something may be happening and showing what they have found was not the answer allows others to narrow down the possibilities better.
A question from Stack Overflow titled ”How to find the sum of an array of numbers?” is an example of a question that did not do a good job of communicating their question. In the body of the forum they asked how to find the sum of an array while giving an example array and what they think the answer may be which is using $.each ,while also stating that they aren’t quite sure how to use their guess They repeated the title in the body of the forum which is not necessary as it is repetitive and did not show what they have tried with their guess, this makes it harder to narrow down to what the answer is. They also did not show their code, by showing their code this would help others rule out other possible mistakes.
Asking questions is an important part of coding as everyone has different approaches to the same problem that can also yield the same result, if your approach does not work it’s important to turn to others to try different approaches. Being able to ask smart questions is important to reach the result you are looking for.