Can a new programmer with limited technical expertise ask a quality question about fundamentals on SO? [closed]

Question

Subtitle: Should beginner's questions be off-topic strictly because they are beginner's questions?

The sorts of questions that newbie programmers ask has come up before many times in side discussions, and comes up constantly on the main site. Here are two examples from today:

Usage of "&" in function calls, confused

C++ vertical bar?

Both of the above questions are well-formed, specific, answerable definitively, not open to opinions and are otherwise directly on-topic for StackOverflow.

However both questions were downvoted and closed by users who said they were off-topic because they were too basic in nature. To quote one particularly pointed comment:

This question appears to be off-topic because it is trivially answerable by reading a beginners' language tutorial.

That pretty much sums it up.

Here's another case posted yesterday:

Possible segmentation fault: Am I using the "this->" operator correctly?

This is another beginner's question. The topic is fairly elementary. The answer can likely be found in Strustrup's book, or any number of other books that we recommend. Considering only that it is a beginner's question of a fundamental nature, should the question be considered off-topic?

Lots of questions are posted from lazy people who are just looking to be spoon-fed answers. Those questions should all be closed because they never meet the quality guidelines. That's not what I'm asking about here. What I'm asking about is just the elementray nature of the question. If the question is elementary, but otherwise meets our quality and topical requirements, is it off-topic?

I have always thought that Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it. But enthusiasts come in all shapes and sizes, from the bright-green newbie writing their first program to the grizzled veterans who have seen and done it all a million times before. I have always felt that SO's stated audience does not, or should not, discriminate based on the expertise of the asker.

Some would say that newbie questions are off-topic because they aren't interesting enough for the answerers. But this seems highly subjective to me. After all, every question is a "no-duh softball" to someone. Just today I provided what I thought was a pretty novel solution to a problem, only to learn a few minutes later that KonradRudolph and Yakk had come up with the same solution over a year before. No-duh.

It seems to me that this has been coming up much more recently. Sometimes I'll chime in with a comment to the downvoters and close-voters suggesting that the level of expertise is not a parameter in deciding if a question is topical. The downvoters will often agree. But we don't have a difinitive resource to point to that says this is so -- it doesn't say it in the FAQs, and I've not found anything difinitive in meta.

So what says meta? Can a question about basics be on-topic for Stack Overflow? If it can be off-topic, how do we know where to draw the line?

Answer 1

The difficulty here arises due to the need for a question asker to have some basic, fundamental knowledge of their craft.

Here's why (a trivial example):

GURU: Double Click the Foo Icon.
USER1: OK.

GURU: Double-Click the Foo Icon.
USER2: What do you mean?
GURU Click it twice with your mouse.
USER2: What's a mouse?

You can immediately see the problem, can't you?

When you ask a programmer how to do something, the expectation is that you have enough knowledge to understand the answer. In most cases, this means that your knowledge will extend beyond simple syntax and other things that can be readily learned from a programming book, or a wealth of tutorials that are available for free on the Internet.

Answer 2

You'd probably be happier if these things got closed as duplicates. However, it is real work to track down a good reference question. On the other hand, the triviality of the matter leaves people absolutely convinced that the duplicate is out there, let alone all the other myriad resources that explain & and |.

Answer 3

Lets define trivial as: "covered explicitly in language tutorials/book for beginners".

There is a common consensus that the fact that something can be found via Google doesn't make the question off-topic, because we'd like ultimately Google results point to SO. Answers to non-trivial questions cover practical problems that have the potential of being helpful to many users, and they're often not an exact copy, but rather a compilation and/or transformation of information found via Google, often with additional explanation in a particular context.

On the other hand answers to trivial questions are so basic they can't be much more than just copy&paste from one of many freely available tutorials. Number of possible trivial questions is enormous in relation to non-trivial questions. For example, if users are allowed to ask about the basics of C++ operators as in questions linked by OP it would then ultimately SO will be just littered with trivial explanations of each part of the language syntax. This is pointless, because answers to these questions won't be helpful to anyone in the future: other users being equally lazy won't find this answer via Google - they will just ask it again. Also it spoils Google search results, when you're interested in an official reference (example - two SO links before the documentation links).