I’ve spent a little time in the Stack Overflow review queues as of late, trying to do my civic duty by helping the programming community, and I’ve learned a few things:
- If the question is about C or C++ code, it’s someone’s homework assignment. Odds are good that they want you to solve it for them, or that they don’t know how to Google the error message they’re seeing.
- If the question is about PHP code, it’s someone in a non-English-speaking country trying to set up an e-commerce website and badly misusing some framework they found.
- If the question is about Java or C#, it’s a hunk of very simple backend business code that pulls data from a database and puts it on a screen, and they’ve managed to fail to understand simple math or data structures involving user accounts and money.
- If the question (or answer) is really good, it was only just a test to make sure you were paying attention, and you passed.
- If the question contains no code at all, it’s that rare question that you can just reject immediately as incomplete, incoherent, and too broad.
- If the question is about Laravel, just run away screaming.
Laravel? I opened the project’s home page and there it is, in the subtitle… “web artisans”. I hate it already 🙂 It took me a while to appreciate just how bad PHP is, you have to be really good to make proper use of a language this bad. Anyone trying to improve on it, is doing it wrong.