BetterPHP

I stumbled upon this http://talkbinary.com/articles/10-reaso ... ogramming/ and thought I would share it to continue the tradition of using the General Chat section like a blog.

The last one

10. I'm waiting for my friend here to solve this problem.

This is probably the top reason out of all listed above why some people just plain suck at programming. If all you are doing is waiting for your buddy to help you out, then you aren’t learning anything at all. Sure, they might spend hours trying to figure it out, but in the end that experience is what counts.

is very relevant to this kind of forum, not so much this one right now which is nice.

But on some similar forums topics along the lines of "How do I do X ?" or "Can you fix X for me ?" are irritatingly common, and when they do get an answer that is not "ffs have a go" the person who posted it will learn nothing at all, meaning the next time they get stuck they don't have the experience of debugging the previous problem to help them with the new one.

That is all.

Good article. Thanks for sharing. It linked to an article about that 14 year old who made millions with his programming skills and his ideas. Amazing ^^

Getting to work now.

All too common.

noob wrote:I have this problem! Fix it!

less-nooby wrote:What have you tried so far?

noob wrote:Tr..Tri...Trieed?

less-nooby wrote:/facepalm

When you look at number ten, you automatically also look at number 5, although you can substitute Google for any searching resource, be it a tutorial site, or YouTube or the like.

The problem is, if people didn't ask then there would be no forum

twiggy wrote:The problem is, if people didn't ask then there would be no forum

The issue isn't when people do ask; the issue is when people ask looking for a direct answer rather than steps to help you find and debug the issue yourself. People want to be handed a solution, and that makes you a less good programmer; if you are able to debug your code you are automatically exponentially better.

twiggy wrote:The problem is, if people didn't ask then there would be no forum

I don't mean not to ask, I mean that instead of asking "how can I make this work ?" you should be asking "what is wrong here ?". The problem is more useful than the working code.

The main problem is that often times, the moment a problem occurs people panic and quickly ask on a forum why the problem happens. (Remember, it's ok to not immediately know what's wrong).

The problem is that they just skip a few steps. PHP has a lot of tools to help you debug your code. A simple echo or print_r can often lead you to the source of the problem, or, in case of some errors, just some common sense. With MySQL operations there's mysql_error(). When this doesn't help, there's Google which is often overlooked. When in search for tutorials, video sites like YouTube and Vimeo can help (or even Google to find some obscure tutorials).

If that still doesn't help you've reached the point where you don't know what to do next and that's usually the point where you've spent enough time to know the problem so you can explain it on a forum where you ask for help from others.

At least... that's my opinion!

I usually ignore those posts

Bahaha. I helped people over Teamviewer with PHP, and when they saw an error in the webpage they'd go f--king off the walls and just start moving the cursor around for about 20 seconds straight, it's like "I SEE THE ERROR, I SEE IT, LET ME HAVE MY MOUSE BACK, IT'S A SIMPLE ERROR.. *melts". Haha. Just my little story of people who don't know simple Syntax errors..