I get the following information when I tried to ask a new question:
Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.
I've never seen such information in other SE forums before. It is totally acceptable to get "bad" qu...
This is a great overview of how to help new programmers. I can't count the number of times I wish I could forward this to people: programmingforbeginnersbook.com/blog/…
@Searke I have a mixed feeling about that article. While I agree with most of what the author said and suggested, he did not emphasize enough (to my taste), that every profession has an entry barrier, which can't be made lower than some minimum. Like Einstein put it, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". The problem is, some part of the road one has to make on their own.
@Searke I realize that the sometimes tough nature of SO would put a number of potentially good programmers off, but OTOH the opposite attitude can breed programmers who substitute true experience and expertise with mindless application of recipes from SO - which is probably even worse. If it is enough for someone to be put off by a few harsh responses on SO, then perhaps that person isn't ready to get into professional programming.
@LeonidShifrin I used to work in tech support for Mathematica. One of the biggest differences between working there and answering questions here is that you can't do what you suggested.
So I'm aware of how hard it is. But it's possible. If someone just doesn't have the background knowledge to understand the documentation for example, you have to explain to them what they don't know and how they might go about learning it. It's not easy. Very hard sometimes to not offend certain types of people.
@Searke @Searke Sorry, my logic was flawed - I realized that after posting that reply.
@Searke Well, your words in this context certainly have much more weight than mine. But also, there is a difference between communication within professional community, and the type of communication with users that tech. support of a commercial product has to carry out.
@Searke You mean, the question was closed and then quickly deleted because it was a dupe (and was it?)? There is certainly some amount of wrongdoing happening, I've seen that many times myself.
@Searke Indeed. But this is a tension that is very hard to resolve or remove. The answering is completely voluntary, and the experts hate any implicit obligations the most, so the only way to ensure they are comfortable answering and spending time on the site was to ensure that they have no obligation to continue a discussion. This is where it differs from the tech. support situation.
Well. it's not just that. I don't want to point fingers, but there's a significant difference in the kind of response that a developer will post and the kind of response that someone from tech support would post.
So even when it's paid support, the difference is there. Learning how to do what that blog talks about takes training.
You're also just really good at this kind of thing from experience.
@Searke OTOH, one has to answer on a case-by-case basis, since one and the same question may come from someone who needs RTFM, or from someone who genuinely did all they could and just didn't have enough level to succeed. These cases should be treated differently, here I fully agree with both you and the author. You can't enforce that though.
@Searke If you mean me personally, then it probably comes from the fact that Mathematica (programming) has been my hobby for a long time, before I started to program in it for a living.
The answers were always completely unexpected and consistent. The developers never understand it. So I usually have to fight to get the documentation fixed.
@Searke The problem is that even if all the documentation gets fixed, that's not enough. There need to be other resources, which explain things in a different manner. The lack of professional literature on using Mathematica is phenomenal
@Searke That's indeed very useful. But again, had there been adequate literature besides the docs, and the problem would be alleviated. This site to some extent should help in this department. B.t.w., I wonder if you felt its impact while still doing tech. support.
That article, although frequently used, is very controversial. Developers generally hate it. The only people who like it are those that have to use it frequently.
Adequate literature is hard. For example, if I asked the developers to flesh out the documentation more that easily might not help. They don't know what about TFM confuses customers because they haven't done empirical work on that. They instead think they can reason what what about the TFM is confusing. Which they can't because the gulf of knowledge between them and the customer is too large.
I was very big into using StackExchange for Mathematica before it became it's own stackexchange sub-site.
@Searke Well, they probably hate it because it tells "how" without telling "why" and "when", but this tension seems to be a hard one to remove. People often have no time or desire to learn "why" or "when", but then they can easily abuse the answers, since they don't understand them. This is perhaps what disturbs the devs.
@Searke Well, I think I personally suffer less from that, because I've been on both sides. So, when I can, I try to explain both "how" and "why" / "when". But I enjoy that, while many others don't.
@Searke I hope you (and Leonid Shifrin) don't mind me barging into your conversation but I actually read the article you linked a while back and found its format really useful. It provided a "quick and dirty" explanation for a fellow colleague that asked me about NumericQ.
It wasn't easy to communicate to other people what the site was and how it affects technical support. People are always hesitant to adjust to things like that.
You have to develop policies about it. For example, do you help people who link you to their question on this site? You can't compete with the speed of the responses people can get on this site.
People on this site also... have a way of promoting... undocumented and unsupported features. You, in particular, are guilty of this, which caused no minor amount of headache for me.
A customer would write us asking something and we'd have to say "Here's what we have..." and then they'd come here and a developer would say "I made this secret device I put into this context over here that does what you want! Have Fun!"
That's hard to work with.
Stackexchange has a different set of advantages. I'm sure there was some worry that people who pay for premium levels of support would abandon it for this site.
There were people who did that. They were usually ... problematic and it was interesting to see how they were received by mathematica stackexchange community.
@Searke Well, I am sorry about that. Usually I try to strike balance so that I use undocumented stuff only when I consider it really very beneficial, and usually I warn about the status of such code. But partly this is also a problem of the distribution model.
@Searke Interesting... Knowing about such cases from the inside should certainly put it into a different perspective for you. But I don't think SE can really replace the tech. support, nor should it. Ideally, it would supplement it and make the work for tech. support easier.
@LeonidShifrin It's not your fault. We just didn't have a coherent policy on stuff like that. I could easily have lost my job if I informed people of things like upcoming releases before they were officially announced. But other people weren't aware of such restrictions. So it's hard to be an authoritative source of information
@LeonidShifrin Stackexchange often makes things harder.
For example, customers will link you to their content here instead of writing an email. Sometimes that's very unhelpful. Additionally, the conversation here might be something you're just not allowed to talk about. Like a release or a secret feature some awesome developer made that we can't provide technical support for yet.
I was an early supporter of trying to get our own official SE like website. That turned into the community site eventually. I hoped it would resolve those problems.
Also, I liked the idea because people are generally nicer on here than in private email.
@Searke In this regard, I was always sceptical. The resource should be free and independent of the company, to become really strong, I think. This certainly creates tensions, like those you mentioned, but I don't think this is necessarily bad for the product and the company.
@Searke If you mean in particular my Streaming module, I have discussed publishing some info about it with my manager, prior to doing so. The problem is, we do need some ways to interact with people and show them unfinished functionality, to get early feedback. This is a fundamental problem with our current delivery model.
@LeonidShifrin Yes. I remember you saying this early way back when the site first started. I thought about it too, but I didn't think it was very worried about the community being restricted in some totalitarian way. That's probably because I know the people who are charge of that though.
For me, the reason for having the community site now is more to ensure that we have a means of providing community based tech support independent of another company and so we can try various different things with it.
It seems there are many similar questions on Mathematica.SE, but none addresses (to the best of google) exactly my problem. I have the following data:
L[1] = {{0.0200, {-3.98, -0.902}}, {0.120, {-3.97, -0.890}}, {0.220, {-3.94, -0.860}}, {0.320, {-3.89, -0.811}}, {0.420, {-3.82, -0.744}},{0.520,...
I am trying to use FindClusters to segment data points into two special parts
data
ListPlot[data, PlotRange -> All, AspectRatio -> Automatic]
It is clear that these points can be divided into two parts, each radial arm can be treated as one part. I've tried different DistanceFunctions but ca...
Given that I have two variables $\theta,t$, for the varible $t$, $\theta$ always owns several values. Namely, $$\{t,\theta_1,\theta_2,\theta_3,\theta_4...\}$$
where $t$ in the interval$[0,1]$ and $\theta$ in the interval$[0,2\pi]$
My sample data
originalData=
{{0,2.99939,6.16435},{0.010101,3.0...
@Searke I link to that article often. That question keeps coming up again and again, and it's not a simple RTFM ... it requires a somewhat involved understanding of the evaluation order.
I get the following information when I tried to ask a new question:
Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you're in danger of being blocked from asking any more.
I've never seen such information in other SE forums before. It is totally acceptable to get "bad" qu...
I am trying to use FindClusters to segment data points into two special parts
data
ListPlot[data, PlotRange -> All, AspectRatio -> Automatic]
It is clear that these points can be divided into two parts, each radial arm can be treated as one part. I've tried different DistanceFunctions but ca...
Given that I have two variables $\theta,t$, for the varible $t$, $\theta$ always owns several values. Namely, $$\{t,\theta_1,\theta_2,\theta_3,\theta_4...\}$$
where $t$ in the interval$[0,1]$ and $\theta$ in the interval$[0,2\pi]$
My sample data
originalData=
{{0,2.99939,6.16435},{0.010101,3.0...
