In message ,
Lostgallifreyan writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in
:

Sometimes I wish someone would just give me the answer. I would if
asked. Saves time letting them hang themselves reaching for un-needed
complexity, or wondering if a thing ever worked right. As a kid I
learned best from breaking

Any good teacher will say it's better to guide you until you find the
answer for yourself; you'll be much more satisfied, and know _why_ it's
the answer as well as just what the answer is.


That's true, but takes time. Coders seem to dislike spending time on anything
other than their work, even when willing to help, so will usually give a
terse collection of function details, arguments for them, etc. (And
occasionally, RT(F)M should be taken to mean 'I don't know, and don't want to
admit it or spend time discussing it'). I recently got the impression that

(-: indeed!

coders who use C++ may not even know how to open a file in ANSI C.

The API references usually just give the calls in an abstracted manner, parts
to assemble, without working context. The wxWidgets guide goes further, it

Yes. I remember a DOS C compiler/system - I'm pretty sure it was
Microsoft! - that had examples in its help system; I think it even made
it not particularly difficult to use their example code in whatever you
were coding. (It was a split screen thing, blue text on white IIRR as
lots of things were in those days.) I agree, things that give the
abstract answer without context are irritating: IIRR "The Algol report"
was like that, and I was _going_ to say K&R (all hail) too, but I think
they _did_ give examples. (The canonical "Hello world" for example.)
[]
I remember that the 'worked example' was a major part of even the driest
textbooks from schools in the last quarter of the last century, the idea
being that study of it would show one context, and the aim being to
understand how to modify it to fit others.

Indeed.

People now seem to think that asking for this is asking for fish when we
should learn to fish. It's not, it's like asking for a working fishing rod.
Which is reasonable, If we break it, we learn more than if we never see it

Indeed. (I seem to be using that word a lot today!) Of course, the third
line of "give a man a fish ..." is "show him the internet, and he'll
never bother you again" - though whoever wrote that meant that it will
waste his time for ever, rather than educate him, I think!
[]
stuff, but I only learned a lot fast if it worked in the first place.
That's a hell of a motivator, especially when the stuff wasn't mine
because the sooner I fixed it, the less trouble I'd be in.

(-:

The lessons were memorable.

Circum-oral clips?
[]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If it's pretentious, then at least it's not the sort that wears a horned helmet
and shrieks about trolls. - Stuart Maconie in Radio Times, 14-20 November 2009.