This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.

Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Stack Overflow & Discouraging Beginners

“The thing is, bad questions don’t destroy the community. […] But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they’re doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners.” — lambda on Hacker News

Despite saying that I was not going to learn how to code, I’ve been playing around with Learn Python the Hard Way. The author has a smart practice of posing questions to the student as quasi-homework — your job is to Google around until you find the answer. Thus you build the habit of solving puzzles via research.

snake clipart

In the “Study Drills” section of the fifth exercise, the author instructs, “Try more format characters. %r is a very useful one.” I suspect I’m not the only student who instantly searched “Python format characters”. One of the first results was a page from the Python 2 docs. The answer was in there, but I didn’t realize that because it was way the hell down the page (here). The top of that page said this, which I found incomprehensible:

“The principal built-in types are numerics, sequences, mappings, files, classes, instances and exceptions.

Some operations are supported by several object types; in particular, practically all objects can be compared, tested for truth value, and converted to a string (with the repr() function or the slightly different str() function). The latter function is implicitly used when an object is written by the print() function.”

I read that and thought, “Well, this must not be what I’m looking for!” Back to Google. The next place I went was a Stack Overflow question:

"I've been looking for the list Python format characters for a good 30 minutes. I can't find any. Examples are %d, %r etc but I need a list with them along with a description if possible please." Closed on Stack Overflow as "not a real question".

Aha! Someone had the same problem I did! (Granted, I was a couple minutes into my search, not thirty, but the original post was from 2010.) Underneath the request for help, a closure note called this… “not a real question”? Hmm, okay. I guess the OP didn’t follow all the “You Must Try, and then You Must Ask” rules (which I wholeheartedly believe in, and to which Stack Overflow’s guidance seems similar) — but it was pretty clear what they were looking for.

I scrolled down to read the answers. This was the first one, ranked by upvotes:

“Here you go, Python documentation on old string formatting. Took me one minute to find (tutorial -> 7.1.1. Old String Formatting -> ‘More information can be found in the [link] section’), something must be wrong with your search strategy ;)” — user delnan

This is helpful because it provides the desired information. But it profoundly fails to empathize with the beginner’s struggle. I suspect that the person who asked this question, like me, found that docs page easily. It was just totally non-obvious that the answer was in there! I appreciate the third Stack Overflow response, which has a tenth of the first one’s upvotes:

“In docs.python.org Topic = 5.6.2. String Formatting Operations http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting then further down to the chart (text above chart is ‘The conversion types are:’) [¶] The chart lists 16 types and some following notes. [¶] My comment: help does not include attitude which is a bonus. The attitude post enabled me to search further and find the info.” — user oceandreamer

Another user, Lennart Regebro, commented, “The first hit [on Google] is now tragically this stupid question” instead of the Python 2 docs page. Well, the docs didn’t help me at all without access to “this stupid question” and the explanations it provoked. Because you don’t know what you don’t know — reading the top of that docs page made me think it had nothing to do with what I was looking for. Yes, I was wrong, but that’s because I’m a goddam beginner! By definition I’m not good at parsing technical documentation!

If your answer to this problem is “read the entirety of every docs page to make sure there is no relevant section”, you’re being totally unrealistic — it’s just not going to happen. Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either.

Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place.

I don’t think the docs of a programming language should be tailored to newbies who have no idea what they’re doing. That would be silly. I do think that people who participate in learning-oriented spaces should not answer questions with this jaded, snarky, put-upon air. It is the opposite of welcoming and it does nothing to make me feel delighted about talking to programmers. But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people to learn how to code, then you’re doing it right.


I quoted Hacker News user lamdba at the beginning, but their comment is so good that you should really go read the whole thing.

It’s Okay to Not Learn How to Code

Sometimes — actually quite often — I think to myself, “I should learn how to code.” When I’m feeling particularly peppy, I open up a Khan Academy tutorial. Then after a few minutes I get bored and scroll through Twitter instead. Sure, programming languages are cool and useful, but so is geometry, and I don’t spend my free time on that either.

Image created by Octavian Arnaut. Posted with this comment: "EveryMatrix is looking for programmers."
Image created by Octavian Arnaut.

Here’s the thing: if I were the type of person who would be good at coding, I would have already been playing with Python and Ruby for years. I would have been entranced by HTML in fifth grade — instead of learning the rudiments from Neopets and moving on — and I would have branched out from there.

Realistically, I don’t want to learn how to code. I want the social cachet of being able to build stuff using computers, and I want the high salary a programmer can command in today’s labor market. But there are much easier ways to garner social cachet, ways that exploit my comparative advantage. Maybe I won’t make as much money as the wizards who design APIs and put together apps, but that’s just a function of supply and demand. In other words, it’s a reflection of my skills’ economic value, not a reflection of my value as a human being. Besides, I’ll earn enough.

Illustrations of dev work by Cathy Zhu.
Illustrations of dev work by Cathy Zhu.

Even if I forced myself to learn to code, I still wouldn’t be competitively good at it, because I’m not interested. There’s nothing in particular that I want to build that I can’t already hack together using basic OSS or otherwise freely available tools. I have found that it’s impossible to teach myself anything that I’m not enthused by, so why bother trying? There are so many subjects that I do find fascinating — better to focus my energy on those areas instead.

I’m giving myself permission to NOT learn how to code. If something changes and I find myself drawn to it, or if I need more technical capabilities to advance a project, I’ll revisit those Khan Academy tutorials. Either way, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sign up for my newsletter to stay abreast of my new writing and projects.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program. If you click on an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you).