A mailing list is not a debugger

People offering answers on developer mailing lists often apologise for typos by blaming the "Outlook compiler." Many subscribers seem to take the metaphor a step further by using the list itself as a debugger.

To be clear, I have no problem with people posting code which doesn't work and they can't understand why. Developer mailing lists exist to help people solve problems and gain understanding. But it does aggravate me when people don't even bother trying to understand the problem themselves: they turn first to the list, as a no-brainer action.

Look at this. The guy has an error in his stored procedure, it comes back with a clear error number, the error message tells him it's on line 31, and what does he do? He posts it to the mailing list. Does he even look at line 31? Clearly not, as the error is trivial. Does he look up the error message in his database documentation? Not that he mentions. No, just run it up in the "Outlook debugger" and make it somebody else's problem.

The reason this angers me is that, well, it's so parasitic. The message is, "I care so little about the time of the other 1000 guys on the mailing list that I can't be bothered to put in even 30 seconds investigating the problem myself -- I'll just leech off you." No, I'm sorry. My time is just as valuable as your time. I don't mind giving you my time to save you significant effort or if you're really stuck or if I'm going to learn something -- and I'm grateful that there are people out there who will do the same for me -- but I do resent giving up my time when you've shown no inclination to put in any time yourself.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, in this particular case the poster was bothering a Windows Forms list with what was obviously a T-SQL issue. If you're going to use a mailing list as a debugger, at least think about which mailing list to use.

I'd like to call out a notable exception to this rant. Developer lists often see dumb questions from beginners, and sometimes they get pretty short shrift. I do feel that modern development frameworks are sufficiently intimidating and hard to navigate that beginners do need to ask dumb questions just to get their bearings. Yes, often the answer is obvious or they should just read the documentation. And if they prove that they're not willing to try to get their bearings, but instead ask the list as the first port of call, then let's put them in the killfile at that point. But when you're just striking out, it can be really hard to know where to start, and a brief, courteous pointer to the right documentation or API can really save a lot of time.

On a related note, a quick reminder: putting "OT" in the subject line does not make it acceptable to post any random question or issue to an inappropriate list just because it happened to be at hand. Thank you.