At the risk of sounding old, I think that people are more demanding of instantaneous results these days. When many (most?) of us were starting out programming, there was no Internet, not in the way we know it now at least. So we bought or borrowed a book. And we read it. And it took time but that was just how it was. After learning BASIC, C, Z80 assembly and Modula-2 (that was a waste of time), I got into CrossBasic/REALbasic. I remember printing out the original REALbasic user guide and language reference - this wasn’t a very good idea really, as it was absolutely huge - and I used to study it endlessly.
I get the feeling that the net has trained people, especially young people, to expect instant results. 2 minute videos or a badly written blog post to learn, say, the concept of object-oriented programming, is hardly going to cut it. But people seem to expect it to. And this seems to spill over onto forums sometimes. “Read a manual?! Can’t you just give me the answer?” Of course, reading the manual often is the answer!
Now, this is not the case with all newbies, of course, we have some great ones here (apart from the recent incident mentioned by Michel) who like to be pointed in the right direction, rather than just handed code. I don’t want to see them put off asking questions, even if the rest of intuitively know where to find the answer. In that spirit, I approve of Tim’s initial post that if you feel bugged by someone’s post, that you just “walk away”.
