Re: Answering questions and questioning questions

What's wrong with answering the question, and then offering opinions why you might think it is not a good idea?

I had someone give me the answer that I asked, and then said, hey why don't you do it this way, and proceeded to give an example. It was infinitely better, and so I went with it.

However, should his way not have been good for reasons that he could not know (due to other issues not in the original post), I still had the answer to my original question.

However, 'why don't you just use a hash' is not always informative, because maybe the OP (me in this case) doesn't know how to use a hash to solve their particular problem.

Comment on Re: Answering questions and questioning questions

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Re: Re: Answering questions and questioning questions by mcogan1966 (Monk) on Dec 18, 2003 at 18:08 UTC
I have to agree here. The "Why did you do it that way?" question alone is very irritating. But, when the question is followed by someone's idea of faster / smarter / better, it provides insight to a solution that may be more than the original intent. I've had people answer some of my questions with little more than the "Why do you want to do that?", and I realized that they have their own way of thinking, but didn't want to share it. And simply saying, "Don't use that, use this instead", without giving an example of usage is little more than taking a tool away, and replacing it with a different tool that the person hasn't a clue how to use. They still won't have a good answer, and they are likely to be more confused than when they started.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Answering questions and questioning questions
by mcogan1966 (Monk) on Dec 18, 2003 at 18:08 UTC

I've had people answer some of my questions with little more than the "Why do you want to do that?", and I realized that they have their own way of thinking, but didn't want to share it. And simply saying, "Don't use that, use this instead", without giving an example of usage is little more than taking a tool away, and replacing it with a different tool that the person hasn't a clue how to use. They still won't have a good answer, and they are likely to be more confused than when they started.

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