The degree to which it is acceptable to shit on students is a result of the prohibitions on laughter stackOverflow's moderators love. All the meanness and tribalism finds it's way oit and is vented upon the weakest members of the community.<p>Yes, students can be rude asshats. But hang around 'regex' and asshattery is no more unusual than 'SML'.<p>This article captures the smug prickishness that stackOverflow increasingly celebrates. JustFuckingGoogleIt was clever a decade ago. It's quick and to the point and the pain is over.<p>Learning to program is hard. A non-working program with a looming deadline is genuinely and legitimacy stressful. And so what does the article do? It begins by belittling the student, telling them their question was not worthy of the great community. Let's be honest, the intended audience isn't students, its other StackOverflow contributors and its purpose isn't to teach but belittle.<p>And that's the shame of it. A good article on debugging could be useful. Hell a teacher might even incorporate it into the class. But of course the StackOverflow community could not produce such a document. It violates their unfortunate tribal mores.
> StackOverflow is not about to debug your programs for you.<p>Could not disagree more. Students: submit your homework to StackOverflow. You'll get yelled at, but someone will be desperate enough for imaginary internet points that they will give you an answer regardless (just make sure you keep your accept rate high enough).<p>(NB: This is facetious. I don't condone submitting your homework to StackOverflow: You won't learn that way.)
This is great, both as actual content and advice to (beginner) programmers but also as "link-bait" in the best sense of the word, i.e. content that is very likely to gather a lot of inbound links.<p>As a very active Stack Overflow user, I immediately start thinking about how many questions that are going to get links to this as comments. :)<p>Well done, I hope it helps although I guess the supply of beginner programmers won't dry up over night.
That is a rather long way of saying "figure out <i>exactly</i> what the program is doing, and whether it matches what you <i>think</i> it should be doing."