The Structure of a Good Programming Question

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Hey, hi again and welcome to yet another

lecture. In this lecture I'll show you

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how to ask a good programming question.

So I mentioned in the previous lecture

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asking a good programming question is

very important to get a good answer and

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let me first show you what a bad

programming question. For instance

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I'm going to click on ask question and

here is the title of a question. A bad

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programming question would have a very

generic title like that. Here is the body

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of the question where you

have to describe your question in detail.

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Some people do they just say: I got an

error when trying to two numbers and they

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just post the question. A better question

would be to include the error, the code

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there that you executed like that.

However that is also not enough because

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you also need to show the error message.

So let me delete this, and a good program

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in question would be We're talking

about questions that have an error,

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questions that talk about an error that

you got in your code. So this is your

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code. A good title would be to include

the error message, so that one would be a

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good fit. If it's a very long message

then you can also you can choose to

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include only the name of the error without

that and then a good question woulb

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be: Hi, I run the following code and

expected to get division in the last print

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statement, but I got an error.

Here is my code, so you put the code

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there, your entire script. Don't worry

if your question is long. It's better to

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be long than to be incomplete and here

is the error. Here make sure to include

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your entire errors trace back including

the output as well. So from this

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line of the command line up to the next

line so this entire thing goes to your

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question. Just copy it. Don't worry if it's

long. Can you help? So that'd be a good

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programming question. Now this is still

missing something very important and

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that is the highlighting of the code. You

need to select the code and click on

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this icon here. The error as well. And let

me pose the question. External links must

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provide free educational content, just

click on proceed and here is the question.

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Here is how it looks like

on the other end. So this question has

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four good elements that make it a good

question.

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The first element is that the poster is

mentioning what he or she expected to

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get as output from the script that here

they were running so it says I was

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expecting to get the division in the

last print statement which is this one

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here, but I got an error so the first

thing is you need to include the

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expected output, you need to explain

what you were expecting because

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otherwise if you don't explain what you

were expecting the other person who

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wants to help you doesn't know the goal

of your code or of your questions so it

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doesn't know how to help you to reach to

that goal. So expected output is the first

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thing. The second thing is you need to

include your entire code

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and make sure that you include your code

as text. It's best to use text,

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rather than screenshots because text, the

person who wants to help you can copy

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your code and run it all their Python

interpreter, but if you includes

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screenshots they are images and it's hard

for other people to try out your code

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If you ask this on stackoverflow your

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question would get closed because if you

ask it or we're using a screenshot

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rather than the text version of your

code, the question will get closed

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because there are very strong rules in

stackoverflow to have a high-quality

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question and answer site. So that's that

second element. The third element is you

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need to include your entire screenshot,

entire error traceback, sorry, so from the

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beginning up to the end. So that was the

third element, and the last element, the

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fourth element is you need to highlight

your code just like that. You see this is

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much more visible and easier for others

to troubleshoot. So the course interface

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has that function there that you can

highlight your code. On stackoverflow

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you also have that capability so just go

to ask question, you write your code here,

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highlight it and then use these curly

brackets. Yeah, that's it. If you ask a

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good questions the odds are that you're

going to get a good answer as well. So I

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hope this makes sense and I hope I showed

you something that you didn't know and

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I'll talk to you later. See you!

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