Re^2: Don't go all PerlMonks on me

[naikonta]

Then it reminds me of what I experienced about 4-5 year ago. A co-worker asked for help about something wrong with his code, regex, to be precise. When I looked at his screen, I wanted to explain about what was wrong with his regex and why it was wrong. Just as I started he stared at me and I stopped immediately. I think that was his "Don't be pedantic. This is not a teachable moment." Only that his statement, more or less, was "Don't explain, just tell me and I'll type" in such expressive way. So that's what we did.

It was like I had a somekind of speech-synthesizer, and he typed whatever I said, well almost :-) "Go to line 24, move the cursor at the opening square bracket, add caret, move cursor over 3 characters to the right, remove that dollar, oh no, sorry, I mean the underscore, the underscore, yes, right. Now, press the ESC, then ZZ. OK, type perl -c add.cgi. Good." (Just FYI, we used vim, well I still do).

Another case is when I was the one who felt the situation. So instead of explaining what was wrong, I said, "follow my instruction and just type what I say." Of course, IMHO, this is not the way for learning process. There's not much (if any at all) for the asker to gain lessons. It's just that in this particular circumstances, the number one and only goal is to have the problem solved.

Update: Now that I have my quota again today, It's please to put ++ on bobf and dana for interesting thread :-)

[dana]

My favorite times when playing secretary, where I am simply typing something someone is telling me to type to add/fix/modify/optimize/you-name-it, are those inevitable moments when the person telling me to type says 'add x' meaning to type an x and I type '+x'. For some reason it always makes me laugh because it dawns on me that I'm not absorbing anything - I am simply putting someone else's brain dump into logical (or illogical) code.

My goal is always to go back and learn from what they just told me to type, however all too often time gets away from me and I don't go back to analyze anything.

White boarding, taking a little longer to understand what I'm being told, helps me to learn new skills and also is necessary for when I need to go back to the script for any reason.