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I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 8:28 pm
by Twayne
I couldn't decide whether this was better in code or here; after reading feyd's minor tirade about wrongly located posts, guess I'll start here<G>!
:offtopic:
LOL, no, I won't, either! Instead I'll pose this little brain teaser?! Why is it, that when you spend a considerable amount of time putting together a clear, concise, carefully worded post asking for help, advice and comments, that the process of writing it up gives the originator the answer he needs!!! Either you guys are good or I'm stupid! I prefer to think you guys are good though.
:dubious:
This neophyte worked so hard putting that together, I'm going to send SOMETHING, even it it's just this little tirade! I just deleted my "greatest question ever" since now i Know the answer! Funny how that works ... where's my coffee?

You guys are REALLY good! Sorry 'bout wasting ether.

Thanks for being there, lol :^]

Twayne

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:42 am
by vargadanis
Haha... :)
Most of the times the same things happens to me. By the time I ask, or shortly after, I know the answer. You just need to take the time to think it through. :)

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:28 am
by pickle
I think that happens because you're forced to think the problem through step-by-step from the beginning. The same thing happens when I'm describing my problems to someone else - I'm forced to re-think about things my brain took for granted. The second pass through triggers something that solves the problem.

Glad you got it figured.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:26 pm
by Mordred
I am a fairly experienced coder and I work with new(ish) technologies all the time, and while having to ask question about something, I sometimes find myself in this position as well. Two theories about it:
1. We're lazy and prefer other people to solve our problems.
On the other hand, this usually happens with problems that burn quite a lot of manpower while battling them, and then they burn some more in the process of composing emails, explaining your setup, what you were doing, what went wrong, what is never mentioned in the docs etc. :banghead: Not the appropriate behaviour for a lazy person if you ask me :)
So I lean in favour of the other explanation:
2. It happens because communicating with humans (while explaining the problem) is much easier and more natural than communicating with computers (while programming). The use of human language brings new angles to the problem. There's an excellent novel, Babel 17 that more or less deals with this, which is essentially the Sapir-Whorf hypotesis applied to programming languages' grammer and APIs compared to human languages.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:56 pm
by s.dot
I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me. :P Sometimes I make topics where only I post in them. 8O

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:35 pm
by Eran
This is why they advocate pair-programming in agile methodologies. The process of explaining a problem to another person is half the distance to solving it.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 6:49 pm
by dml
There's a thesis there for an anthropologist about this strange ritual among programmers where programmer 1 walks to programmer 2's desk, takes a breath, pauses, says "never mind", programmer 2 says "cardboard programmer?", programmer 1 says "yep", and walks away.

I think this is particularly useful for programmers, who who tend to be very sure of the soundness of their chains of reasoning, and are able to keep a sustained focus on some tiny detail of a system, where most people would get bored and distracted and try something else. A sane person who loses their keys wanders around the house keeping their eyes open. I try to isolate the bug, I'll think the keys can't possibly be in the kitchen, because I always put the keys on the hall table as soon as I walk in the door, therefore the keys must be there, and if I don't find them on or under the hall table the first time, I obviously haven't looked hard enough. If I have to explain the problem to someone else, I can't be so fixated on this tiny detail or they'll think I'm autistic, I have to prepare to tell a story (and storytelling is one of those ways of transmitting information from human to human as opposed to human to computer) about the last time I saw the keys: I opened the door, picked up the shopping, wait a sec... and then I see a speeded up film where I walk past the hall table because my hands are full with the shopping, and then I put the shopping down on the kitchen table, clunk, my keys go down beside the shopping, so right now they're in the exact place where I thought it was mathematically impossible they could be.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 2:57 am
by Mordred
dml wrote:There's a thesis there for an anthropologist about this strange ritual among programmers where programmer 1 walks to programmer 2's desk, takes a breath, pauses, says "never mind", programmer 2 says "cardboard programmer?", programmer 1 says "yep", and walks away.
Cool, someone else had the same theory as me :) Do you remember anything about the thesis - name, title, whatever? I'd like to find and read it

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 4:03 am
by JAB Creations
If you stick around the forums long enough you'll notice that I often can't seem to find the answer until after I've posted the thread regardless of how many times I previewed it before posting.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:54 am
by dml
Mordred wrote:
dml wrote:There's a thesis there for an anthropologist...
Cool, someone else had the same theory as me :) Do you remember anything about the thesis - name, title, whatever? I'd like to find and read it
:) Sorry Mordred, I was speculating that somebody could get a PhD by studying the phenomenon, I don't know if anyone actually has. I'd like to read that paper too, if it exists.

Re: I HAD a question, honest!

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:32 pm
by califdon
pickle wrote:I think that happens because you're forced to think the problem through step-by-step from the beginning. The same thing happens when I'm describing my problems to someone else - I'm forced to re-think about things my brain took for granted. The second pass through triggers something that solves the problem.
I think that's absolutely valid, and it also works that way for teachers. When you have to prepare a lesson plan, you discover many "connections" that you wouldn't have recognized without going through the careful sequential process of writing it down.