>>I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing.

Welcome to the problem (as I see it) with SO! As someone who was a complete beginner during the modern age of SO, I can tell you that it sure helped me get into my current career (which is not coding related whatsoever) by driving me away from the profession. "Who the fuck wants to work with assholes like this"?

Was I asking stupid questions? Of course! Does anyone on SO owe me anything? Not even a tiny bit! But this is a cultural choice. If this is what you want, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to. But many people don't want this.

If I go to a library, the librarians will help me to the best of their ability. That doesn't mean they teach me French, but at least show me where the French books are. More often the tone from a comment was "lol, gtfo n00b or get gud m8" which is unhelpful. Rarely was I getting a suggestion of a resource that could help me answer the question I was posing. "RTFM" isn't useful if you don't know what that manual even is.

There's all sorts of people with all sorts of personal stories about their experience with the SO community, ranging from "I wouldn't be the CTO of my company if not for them" to "I will never work in this industry again". I'm not saying I'm right, or that things need to bend to me. I'm just putting a perspective out there.

I mean, there's got to be a minimum bar, right?

It's more like going to a library and asking the librarian for help and then when pointed to a book admitting you don't really know how to read and then asking the librarian for help learning how to read. I'm sure you could find a kindly librarian willing to help you learn to read. But the librarian might also be wondering why you never learned to read in school and might get frustrated if the library is busy and other patrons need help.

Just curious, why did you choose to use SO to learn programming instead of taking a formal course with a real teacher?

SO has always explicitly stated that it aims to be a repository of knowledge. And since theres no site which offers the kind of help you mention (which involves discussion, going back and forth, trying some code, discussing again, trying new code and reaching aha moment) it all goes to SO as well. Reddit will help you much better for that usecase.

I'm bowing out of this, as I wasn't trying to have a discussion. SO was not helpful to me. I hate it and the coding community so much I left the industry as I was starting out. My story is not unique, and other people have also been driven out by this culture. This is my personal story. That's all it was.

Ya'll have fun.

You say you hate the coding community so much yet you like hanging out on HN? HN is the essence of the coding community! Hackers sharing cool stuff with each other.

Please don't judge the entire coding community based on a bad experience with SO zealots. We aren't all mean, I promise :)