Well yes, but also no. Eric Steven Raymond and Rick Moen’s essay on asking smarter questions has the same priniple as this saying. They wrote a guide on how to ask question the smarter way, in order to recieve a useful, insightful, and efficient answer from hackers and developers. It’s similar to how parents always tell their kids to think twice before speaking. When you speak or ask questions without thinking, an incoherant statement or question could come out instead and no one would be able to understand.
This question is an excellent example of a smart question. The author of the question shows what they have tried and what has not worked.
Title: Class Mapping Error in repository pattern
Question: I get the following error on public Repository GetRepository() and TEntity in general. How do I solve it?
<Trying out different ways of implementation code>
This author has put out a relatively specific question pertaining to a specific framework and is asking his question after trying to search for a solution and trying different things. Despite only being posted up for two hours at the time of the post, it has already recieved a good answer.
This question is a perfect example of a bad question.
Title: Test Programs are not running
I've been creating a game engine. When I was testing the code I was receiving following errors:
(Error message)
(More code)
(More code)
(More long code)
In this post, the author didn’t even ask a question. He simply stated that he is getting errors when testing his code and started to put up screen shots of all of his code. The title is very generic as well. What the author should have asked instead would be what he could do to solve it after already trying to find the solution. He had not researched about his error message online but rather asking this question on Stack Overflow was the first option. The author did not attempt to skim down the code so that its easier and faster to read through, but instead, opted to take a screenshot of the source code and even file locations. Due to the lack of detail, they still have not gotten an appropriate and correct answer.
The saying about thinking twice before speaking applies to asking questions as well. People don’t want to read through lines and lines of code in order to answer a vague question when it could have been figured out by searching it up online. Instead, thinking about the question that you have and already trying solutions before asking it would be better. When you try solutions found online before asking, chances are, you will probably fix it. But in the event that doesn’t work, ask a smart question and tell people what you have already tried. That way, someone will take the time to read and understand your question in order to give you an answer.