Encouraging questions

Wednesday, May 3. 2006

Dickson and Gary, two smart fresh guys (in a way) who are working in the same company as me have been asking me number of encouraging programming questions ever since I joined. I'm truly happy to see the change of nature of those questions:

from stupid to full of thought. For instance:

"you always emphasize OO benefits, why don't you go for C++?"
"What's the differences between == and equals?"
"Can VB offer the OO benefits as Java does?"
"why is there must be a web.xml?"
"why we must name the main method as main()?"
"why a java file can't have more than one public class?"

And a lot more...

Mind you, those are absolutely not trivial or silly questions, as many programmers couldn't answer. (I've seen some programmers blindly copied equals(), pasted in everywhere without knowing what it exactly means, just for the sake of getting work done)
However, my answers are not at all important to them, even though I didn't tell, I'm sure they would know soon. What important is I'm glad to have the chance to work with those who have passion in programming (again).

Posted by Steven Yong in non-computer at 15:03 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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I think you're the inspiration and motivating force which enabled these guys to be more thoughtful.

Hard to find people who have a passion for programming these days.

I asked some people who have more working experience than I have, one of whom is a JCP and they can't tell the difference between == and equals(). When I threw the question out about "abstract", they gave me a blank stare.

Anyway, good on you for encouraging people to ask thoughtful questions. These days, people are looking for quick answers and are not motivated to go discover answers on their own.

I'm very evil >:). When juniors ask me some basic questions like this, I ask them back, what can you tell me about this? The reason is that I want them to start thinking on their own and not totally rely on others too much. From there, their passion for programming will probably grow.