Coding Heresy
I hardly ever browse the Windows sub-forum here because it is generally of no interest to me. However I was recently drawn to it as a result of a robust discussion here in the Heap, being a spillover from another animated thread in Windows.
Let me say at the outset we should all recognise that each of us has a unique set of strengths & weaknesses, abilities & limitations: a product of our unique graduation from the "University of Life". So if we think we know more than somebody else about a particular topic, whether that is actually true or not, we can always rest assured that we will know less about some other topic!
Now when a noob comes here and asks a lot of very basic questions which makes it obvious that they know very little about assembly language (which happens quite often), we have several non-mutually-exclusive choices:
1. patiently answer their questions ad infinitum
2. answer their questions but hope they will bring themselves up to speed by further study
3. don't answer their questions directly but suggest references to them so that they can answer their own questions as their knowledge base increases
4. politely suggest they at least learn about basic X86 architecture, programming models, instruction sets, stack operations etc before they hope to start understanding assembler
5. ignore them completely, perhaps with the thought that somebody else will take pity on them (especially if they have a user name like beautiful_damsel_in_distress).
Which is where conflict often arises: one board member might believe that his help is "better", or that another member's help is really unhelpful and counter-productive. And it quickly degenerates from there...
So let's just remember that we all have choices, and bear in mind my second paragraph above. Nowadays I have to admit I tend to go for choice 5 because it's less stressful
