Learn Programming

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Posting Etiquette

Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.
Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.
Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.
Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/

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founded 1 year ago

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Ategon

JaumeI

bugsmith

is this forum meant to support people with basic programming questions? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/learn_programming

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If people are going to post questions with code samples in this forum, I think we need to maybe address some basic underlying requirements. Personally, I prefer a loose moderation wherein we try to ensure a few basic quality of life requirements in posts:

Try not to provide screenshots of code since that's harder to review
If you need help debugging, please try to only provide the bare minimum portions of your code which are relevant
If possible, try to provide a runnable example of your code in question
Try to explain: what you've tried, what the error is, what you think the problem is

I'm not trying to sound pushy about forum etiquette. But I personally am much more likely to review code that meets the above requirements. I like something I can compile and run quickly. I prefer some context as to where the issue probably is. Everything else is sort of secondary to me, but still matters.

What does the community think? Also, what do we want this community to do? Support specific programming questions or general CS career/education questions? Both?

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[–] Ategon 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Theres currently three learning-related communities in the instance (+1 for 4 if you include teach programming). No stupid questions is a general question one, ask experienced devs is more for cs career questions and things you want to ask to developers, and this one is more for people just starting out. I would say it can have both with more of an emphasis of people new to coding (+ being a spot for learning resources) while the others are more for once people code more

The requirements look good to help people get their stuff solved

[–] JaumeI 2 points 1 year ago

I like those requirements. I'll stick a post with them in the top of the community, along with some about career/education questions if you don't mind.

I think that, being still a small community, we can address both topics by now, and if engagement gets too complicated due to community growth, we can split the community. If you all think differently, we can split topics right now, but I think it's too early for that. Thoughts?

[–] forbiddenvoid 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think these seem reasonable, to start. I do prefer not having to type out code myself. It would make sense also, to provide some guidelines for people about how to format code as well.

Might also be worth generating some guidelines for people responding to questions and posts. A quick way to turn someone off of programming is to answer or respond to a question in a way that makes them feel unwelcome or dismissed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

True. Typing out code should be as simple as copy/paste inside two lines of three "backticks" (backtick: `)

E.g.

``` My code ```

My code