(Un)Smart Questions? | Jerome Gavin Demesillo

The first question is simply about the NullPointerException Error and how to fix it. The developer who asked this question even goes more in-depth and asks how the problem occurs, as well as if there are any methods to prevent it from happening. This question has a simple header that grasps people’s attention and then delves into more topics related to the header. The second question is about the Stack and the Heap. The header asks about ‘what’ and ‘where’ they are but then expands into more questions, such as where they are physically located in a computer’s memory, what determines their sizes, what makes one faster, etc. This question is also simple but it generates even more simple and quick questions that can be further explained by the person providing the answer. This allows the explainer to offer a thoughtful explanation about the topic.

Capturing the essence of these questions is crucial for software engineers. Utilizing the way these questions were asked is useful because you’re not only learning from the question but also helping others understand it. It enables the questioner to thoughtfully pose their question while making it easy for the listener to comprehend and respond with an appropriate answer.

Unsmart Questions

“Hey guys, I’m working on my Java project and it just won’t compile. I don’t know what’s wrong, it was working yesterday and now it just gives me an error. Here’s a piece of the code:”

public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello world")
    }
}

Theres a couple reasons why this is an unsmart question. First of all, the title is very vague and does NOT describe the issue. And the code they showed no sign in which they tried to debug or research ehats wrong (all they’re missing is a ; at the end of the println statement). They also did not specifically mentioned what error their compiler said, usually people would put the error they’re getting so that people who are trying to help see exactly whats wrong and have an idea of where to look, instead of having to go through the persons code themselves to find out why the code wouldn’t be working.

ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT to prompt me the example of an unsmart question on StackOverflow.