In Eric Raymond’s How to ask questions the smart way, we are introduced to an especially important topic that not only applies to computer science students, but to anyone who wants to learn about anything. When it comes to asking questions, there is a good way and a bad way to go about it. Whichever of these ways we choose determines the kind of answer we get to our question. Using real questions asked by users on an online forum as evidence, we can see just what it means and how important it is to ask questions the smart way.
Raymond argues that asking questions the smart way will often lead to answers that are more useful. Asking questions in a not-so-smart way will lead to answers that are not as helpful, if at all. Using Stack Overflow, the popular question and answer site for programmers, we can find examples of smart questions and see exactly why they are so important to use. An example of a smart question can be seen from a post titled “Missing return statement within if/for/while”. This individual accurately explained his problem in a short and concise statement. It can be understood that this individual is having a problem with an error that tells him he is missing a return statement when using an if, for, or while loop. In the individual’s post, he gives great detail to his problem and explains his thinking into why he is having trouble. He is basically confused about why he would need another return statement outside of an if statement and asks if making the return type void would fix the problem. After explaining his thinking, he asks for any help in making him understand the problem and thanks the forum readers for their time and help. The individual’s smart question ends up leading to a very helpful understanding of the problem. He is given the explanation that the function must return some kind of value because if the if statement resolves to being false, then nothing will be returned by the function, which is what causes the error. This individual’s post received three upvotes and at least eight responses in total to his question. The results of this individual’s question further prove how important it is to ask question the smart way.
After seeing just how useful smart questions can be, it is time to look at just how unhelpful not-so-smart questions are. An example of this is from a Stack Overflow post titled, “google map directions, why my code won’t work”. First off, the subject header to the question is not only uninformative, but it also uses poor grammar. The header to a question is supposed to be short, informative, and accurate to what is trying to be asked. In this case, the individual who wrote this header should have maybe explained what the program he is writing is about or what language it is written in. Also, it is unnecessary for the individual to state that their code does not work. It can be inferred that their code doesn’t work because they are making a post for help or their problem can more easily be understood in a description message after clicking on the post. After clicking on the post, the user includes all his source code for his project and a short description explaining what he needs to do and that his code isn’t working. Nowhere in this individual’s post does he explain his thinking for why the code is written like it is. It shows that the individual put little effort into asking the question in a smart manner and was just concerned with getting the answer to what was wrong. The individual also does not provide any evidence that he tried to fix any of the problems before posting on Stack Exchange. The code provided by the individual is also not commented or organized well, which makes it even harder to understand what it is that he was trying to do in his problem. It is clearly evident that this user did not ask his question the smart way, which is further proven by the fact that he did not receive a single answer to his question in the two years that it has been posted. The only response to his post was a follow post from himself, trying to further explain the problem he was having. This follow up post was just a single sentence with a screenshot of an error message he was receiving. This example of a not-so-smart question shows exactly why the individual was not able to get the answer they wanted
In conclusion, asking a question the smart way is a helpful and easy way to get the answer you desire. The more effort you put into a question, the better the answer you will get. We saw examples above showing the results of both smart and not-so-smart questions and how the smart question was able to get the help they wanted. It is important that whenever we ask questions, we should do so in a smart way because it will not only be most beneficial to ourselves, but also to other people who may also have the same question. Asking questions the smart way saves time and produces results that far exceed those of not-so-smart questions.