Re: To Joseph M. Newcomer

From: Joseph M. Newcomer (newcomer_at_flounder.com)
Date: 03/25/04 

Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:59:54 -0500

See below...

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 00:56:07 -0800, "Wendy" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>To Joseph M. Newcomer :
>
>I have been reading your responses to the posts for a long time now.
>You remind of my Maths school teacher who instead of explaining in
>kind words was downright rude.
>Does Microsoft consider "tone of replying" before awarding MVP ?
>
>The people who post are generally of the type "How can I do this ?"
>To which I assume a MVP should reply in the tone "It can be done this way"
>
>Instead your typical replies are :
>
>1. "I haven't used this anytime , or I haven't used this for many years"
> --- Who care's if you have not used ?
> --- Reply only if you can assist. Don't display mockery.
****
It suggests that my memory of what I did may be faulty, or that I am telling how to do
something I never have actually done, or my answer was once true but Microsoft may have
either fixed a problem that required that solution, or broken the solution I used, in the
intervening versions since I last did it, so in any case it is a warning: I'm pointing you
at something that suggests a possible solution, but I may be hazy on the details. This is
usually considered a courtesy when my answer may be muddied by time, or rendered incorrect
by changes in MFC, header files, or the OS. So I think that the reader would care that my
advice may be suggestive rather than definitive.
*****
>
>2. "Why on earth would you want to do this ? "
> --- Are you paying the guy ? , then why bother in first place.
> --- People solve problems as per their intelligence.
> --- Don't insult their intelligence.
*****
Because a huge number of people have peculiar ideas about what should be done, or how it
should be done. In particular, my experience usually suggests that the person is trying to
do something seriously inappropriate, and I'd say the same thing to them if they walked
into my office and asked the same question. Most times when someone gets this answer, it
is not an issue of intelligence, but experience. And often serious misconceptions about,
for example, how GUI interfaces work.
*****
>
>3. "I don't know , but it might be trivial"
> --- Nobody is Albert Einstein , I have seen old dogs saying I don't know.
> --- Yet they are polite , not rude.
****
I fail to see how that response is construably rude. It says that I'm guessing that the
answer is probably simple, and is usually followed by some suggestions about where the
person might look, or what issues might be relevant, but my suspicion is that the answer
is not one of the subtle-obscure-and-complex type answers so necessary in some areas of
Windows programming, but most likely straightforward.
****
>
>I sincerely hope you would improve in your tone and show respect towards
>others. Because everybody has to admit that your tech knowhow is far superior.
****
I've been giving advice in programming for nearly 40 years (three months after being hired
for my first job, I became the recognized expert in two key systems-programming aspects of
the machine I was then working on). I have found that the best advice in many cases is
"Don't do that. Don't even try". But I continue to be astonished at the
totally-off-the-wall ideas I hear suggested. Particulary by the people who want to do
something that is not supported in Windows (nor was it supported in any windowing OS I've
ever programmed, including X, Mac, Aegis, etc.) but are deeply offended because they think
what they want to do is so "trivial" that it OUGHT to be easy (e.g., setting the parent of
an app to be your window so you can run the app "embedded" in an MDI app). Or running some
external program to solve something that has a simple API.

In many cases, the problem is that the poster fastens onto an ill-conceived solution and
says "how do I implement this bad solution" (and experience tells that whatever they are
trying to solve, this is not going to be the solution) instead of saying "I have this
problem, what solutions should I be looking for?". But they seem insistent on pursuing
some bad idea to its illogical conclusion, without actually saying what problem they are
trying to solve. So when I ask "why in the world would you want to do that?" it translates
as "You have a really bad idea here, and what you are asking doesn't even make sense, in
that it won't solve any problem I am aware of, because it is a deeply-flawed approach to
nearly any problem".

I also tend to be rude to the people who post questions that say, in their entirety, "My
compilation failed. What did I do wrong?" (in once case, they knew the compilation failed
because when they ran the program it gave assertion errors, but it took two more messages
to elicit that explanation...). Or people who fail to actually read the documention ("It
failed. What I did was the following..." followed by an example that directly violates the
actual API documentation, which in one case said "the following two styles are
inconsistent and must not both be specified", and needless to say, both had been
specified).

You may notice I tend to give more detailed and probably, by your standards, more
"polite", answers to people who post questions that describe the problem they are trying
to solve, give complete error messages, show reasonable code examples, etc. And long and
detailed answers to those who are beginners, or at least give evidence of being people who
need to learn and merely lack experience. I can be downright rude to those who insist that
their known-to-be-flawed solution HAS to work, and if it doesn't, it is entirely
Microsoft's fault (most of whom have never programmed any windowing system, or possibly
any other operating system, and therefore don't know all the problems in X, Mac, KD,
Gnome, Unix, Linux, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, etc. I see Windows as Just Another Windowing
System on top of Just Another Operating System, and I don't expect it to support things it
was never designed to do).
                                joe

****
>
>Wendy

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@flounder.com
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm

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