which method is better

[RavensFan]

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@rayclout wrote:

altenbach

As a researcher at a university, our students are coached to adopt LV as their programming preference, but myself and my colleagues have on numerous occasions had students come to us after visiting this forum looking for help only to be turned off by the attitude of some of the knights and veterans on this forum who firstly choose to ridicule their efforts before being of any help. These students are lost to LV and would rather stick with C or C++........NI's loss.

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I think there is a big problem in the way students are being sent to the forums to get help.  Every semester about midway through, we start seeing a rise in "homework" questions.  The sense I get from those threads is that the students are given a LabVIEW assignment, and are not being taught anything about LabVIEW in the classes by their instructors or teaching assistants.  Those questions start out "I've been given an assignment to design a nuclear reactor in LabVIEW.  Can you give me a VI or step by step instructions on how to do it?"  And when people start replying to the threads, the student messages go something along the lines of "well our instructor didn't teach us much about LabVIEW."

Sometimes the questions are a little more specific, but those questions are often "I need to get my LabVIEW data into Excel.  How do I do that?"

The people who respond in the forums, particularly the knights, and champions, and enthusiasts are all people who are volunteers.  And we frankly get tired of the stupid questions that if the person took 5 minutes to google or search the forums, they might actually find their answer without ever needing to ask the question.

We volunteers aren't here to teach basic LabVIEW skills.  That is what the tutorials are for.  And that is what the instructors should be teaching as well when they give out these assignments.  Instead, it seems like the instructors don't want to be bothered, so they just tell the students about the LabVIEW forums and to get their answers there.  Why are your students turning to the forums first, THEN going to you and your colleagues?

Well the students can get there answers here, and they don't even usually need to ask the question if they bothered to put a little effort in to search and read.

The most inane "how to I get data into Excel" questions seem to come from the people who post their first forum question a minute after they've created their login name.  If I had my way, people would not be allowed to post a message until they had been registered on the forums for at least several weeks, or at least read some minimum amount of messages such as a thousand.

[rayclout]

RavensFan

As a knight if NI, you personally are one of the most respectful and helpful advisers on the forum. I have always found you to respond decently and expertly to those you have helped.

In fact you have helped myself through some problems in the past......without taking the pi$# out of me.

My point is that this is possible, in spite of your sometimes frustration over inane questions. I suspect that it doesn't take a great effort on your part to be civilized (or non-sarcastic) in your postings.

But this behaviour is not consistent from all the knights, champions, and enthusiasts.

I am smart enough myself to weed out those who are simply seeking completed code for their application, but when I do, I don't reach for the poison pen. I just ignore them. They'll eventually go away....especially after the homework deadline has passed.

A decent amount of the learners on this forum aren't students, but users of LV like myself who use it only enough to know just how much I don't know.

I appreciate those who take the time to help me.

Regards

Ray

[tst]

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rayclout wrote:

My point is that this is possible, in spite of your sometimes frustration over inane questions. I suspect that it doesn't take a great effort on your part to be civilized (or non-sarcastic) in your postings.

But this behaviour is not consistent from all the knights, champions, and enthusiasts. 

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Ray, for what's it worth, I agree with you. I've been regularly participating here for the better part of a decade, and while in general these forums are extremely well behaved, there are cases where some of the regulars respond in uncalled-for tones, sometimes even without proper reason. I think that even I may have been guilty of this once or twice (although probably with good reason).

I don't think I've ever seeing Altenbach do this, though. While his replies may sometimes seem confusing and condescending to beginners, it's both hard and boring to reply with a lot of details to simple questions. As an experienced LV user, you don't always remember that certain things are unknown to beginners and it's not always easy to gauge the level of the person who asks the quesion.

Personally, I also take your approach - if someone's annoying, just ignore them.

[_Bryan]

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@rayclout wrote:

and by the way......if you read my original post.......please point out my "attitude"

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I did not see any attitude in your original post.  I also did not see any attitude in the first response.  He noticed that the code "seemed" incomplete and pointed out a few problems that he saw at a first glance that could be fixed.

Then you respond "........pointing out the flaws as usual......" after asking "unless somebody can see some glaring problems in my code" in your original post.  Not producing data could be considered a glaring problem in your code.

So I am still not seeing any attitude in the 1st response.  I guess it would help if you could narrow down the attitude part for me in the 1st response, then I might understand.  I am not saying that attitude never happens here, I just do not see any in the first response.

[MoReese]

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@altenbach wrote:

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@rayclout wrote:

It was suggested on this forum that the p/c style would be better suited for my application.

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This code seems very incomplete. Nothing is "produced" in the upper loop except heat from the CPU running at full bore spinning the loop like crazy polling the stop button. Of course the error status never updates once the VI is running and you never see a new error because it is isolated by tunnels.

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Sorry Ray,  but I don't see anything wrong with what Altenbach said.  It's hard at times to judge a person's response in cyberspace due to the lack of visual inicators such as body language and facial experessions, but in this case I think your were reading too much into what he said.  Perhaps it was the critique of the empty producer loop.  He was simply telling you what the loop was doing which might not be obvious to a novice user.  Don't take it to heart.

[rayclout]

Firstly, let me say thank you to all who took the time to comment on what I see as a hidden but none-the-less issue with the forum.

Further, if you could indulge me one last post on this issue, I'd like to sum up what my take on this is now

• I may have over-reacted to the comment made and my apologies. In my defense, I see too many respondents make flippant and what seem to be condescending remarks about code ( based around frustration and feelings of exasperation, I'm sure), that lets face it, may have cost the coder a great deal of time and hair-pulling. To the more advanced user it may seem trivial, but that's no excuse to further trivialise it. Please don't make assumptions.
• Due to seeing this many times on the forum I was primed to expect it happen to myself sooner or later and acted inappropriately.
• There are those learners who need to be more mindful of the time that is spent by the enthusiasts, etc. and not expect the work to be done by any other than themselves.
• If a person has posted a question within minutes of registering on the forum, this does not necessarily mean that they have not conducted an extensive search either on the forum nor using google. You don't need to be registered to search the forum, only to post. They may have simply given up on searching and sought the advise of the experienced. I realise there will be exceptions.....but they are very very obvious.
• The forum exists for all levels of LV programmers, and we should make all feel welcome.

Thanks again for your perserverence

Regards

Ray