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richrichardsson

> "well you don't need that anyway!"

Something similar used to frustrate me no end when asking the Python community for help trying to solve a problem.

Regularly someone would comment, "Why would you want to do that?".

I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a need to do it!

It's bizarre that some people can't see beyond the end of their own nose and imagine different use cases to their own.

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As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of. Sometimes it's asshole-behaviour, but it's often people sharing the benefit of their experience; my thinking has gone awry at some point several steps back and they want to make life easier for me.

> As an amateur developer, I've often found that "Why would you want to do that?" is followed by an explanation of a much better way that I hadn't even thought of.

Unfortunately in my experience it is often followed by an explanation of why what I'm trying to do isn't what I should want to do, as though I am not aware of my own goals and constraints.

You'd probably get the same question from a plumber if you asked him how to plug a pipe in a non-intuitive way. He has no way to know your pipes are laid out in a strange way, and the only spot you have left to add said junction without redoing your plumbing is back there - unless you tell him.

Sure, some people are assholes, but that's just people. Nobody's in your mind, they can't guess your requirements, thought process and level of experience. In my experience, more often than not, asking the question "why would you want to do that?" gets you a bad reason. "I did X this way because Y. I need Z." would filter the legitimate questioning out. From there, the others are just assholes, and those are everywhere.

In my experience, "why would you want to do that" is dismissive, defensive gatekeeping, typically used to imply that the questioner is an idiot, whereas "why do you want to do that" extracts a reason, bad or not, that can be worked with.

I'm fairly active on the Python slack channel, and this very question comes up really often when people ask for help, and in my experience, is basically never meant as disrespectful.

As for the small differences in semantics, I'm not a native speaker, neither have outright negative connotations to me, but I feel like getting tripped up on such a small thing - and simultaneously assuming the interlocutor's intentions - is kind of overblown.

The semantic difference is not small. "Would", using the subjunctive, implies that the "want" is theoretical, that the person asking is in some sense trying to come up with a hypothetical situation that can be written off as being unrealistic or a silly edge case. Using it diminishes the experience of the questioner and is intrinsically disrespectful. The fact that people have got used to hearing it so much that they use it without questioning how rude and unwelcoming it is says more about that community than about the grammar.

"Do", in the present tense, does not carry those connotations. It implies "I have acknowledged that your want is present and real, but I need more information about your context to be able to help."

> You'd probably get the same question from a plumber if you asked him how to plug a pipe in a non-intuitive way. He has no way to know your pipes are laid out in a strange way, and the only spot you have left to add said junction without redoing your plumbing is back there - unless you tell him.

Sure, but if I told a plumber they'd understand and help me find a solution to my problem. That isn't what happens on StackOverflow, instead they try to convince you that you have to change your problem to fit the solutions they're familiar with.

Ah, yeah, StackOverflow is kind of a beast of its own.

To be fair, there's a lot of people asking for help on X-Y problems in the programming world, especially on python, and often the fastest way to sort out someone's issue is to walk it back to the original problem X they were trying to solve.

Yeah, but if you don't have an XY problem, you have to spend a lot of your question pre-defending the "it's not an XY problem" stance and lordy ... is that frustrating.

There's a lot of people out there who are happy to tell you that you have an XY problem, but when you explain why it is not, ... crickets.

There's all the difference in the world between asking "why do you want to do that?" and "why would you want to do that?"

Often asking "why" is to tease out XY problems. It's not that the experts can't see past the end of their own nose, but rather that they have the experience to recognize questions that indicate the questioner has wandered off into the weeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

The people replying like that are in the barely-not-novice-anymore category themselves, and their mental model of the world is that everybody is just fumbling around doing everything wrong like they were doing themselves a short time ago. It's true that when you are just past the point where you're not totally useless any more, there is a point where you think you're God's gift to the world (not judging - I have felt like this many times over, it goes away after the next big hurdle you run into...), and it's impossible at that stage to imagine the type of abstract thinking you get after many more years of experience.

But yeah - the 'XY problem!' crowd (along with the 'But The Rules!' crowd) has also totally destroyed Stack Overflow.

I can deal with a "Why would you want to do that?". What I cannot deal with is "It's not standard practice" kind-of answers.

But, it's also a reasonable response to prevent bloat. Not asking that question is how anything with backwards compatibility guarantees, especially languages, get too complex over time. Asking the question doesn't mean you've hit a wall; the maintainers may just be going through a mental checklist to try to keep this from being a major pain for them in 10 years.

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