The Art of Smart Questions

What are smart questions?

In any field of work, having the ability to ask smart questions is essential. Having the ability to ask smart questions leads to better and faster responses from others. Asking smart questions may be difficult but try to make questions specific and include context to ensure that the person answering the question understands what you need help with. Even though there is no such thing as asking “bad questions”, asking not-so-smart questions could potentially lead to confusion because the question is unclear or not enough information is provided to the person answering. However stupid questions are still questions, so even though there may be some confusion, people can communicate with one another to understand what is being asked.

Examples of Smart Questions

Whenever coders are stuck and want help online, they can use a website called StackOverflow. Stack Overflow is an amazing resource for coders who have issues with coding because they can ask “smart” questions and get answers back from other coders. Using the question section of Stack Overflow, I have found some examples of what smart questions and not-so-smart questions are.

In C you can do this:

int arr[i];
From what I understand this is called a VLA - variable length array - which is an array whose size is not known at compile-time, which in most implementations is stored on the stack.

My question is, in the implementations of VLAs that store the array on the stack, do they store the size of the array somewhere at runtime? If yes, where? If not, how do you know at runtime how much to decrement the stack pointer once the array goes out of scope?

Note: The same question also applies for alloca.

This question meets the requirements for a smart question. The questions are clearly stated and the user demonstrates understanding of their topic. Since this question met the requirements for smart questions, the user has received multiple answers from others. This demonstrates how important asking smart questions is to receive helpful feedback from others.

Not-So-Smart Questions

my problem is that it knows to turn because I added a debug.log statement but it still will not turn even though I have the quaternion.RotateTowards function.

At first I tried to replace the Quaternion.RotateTowards with transform.Rotation which worked but it was an instant rotation.
 I have a feeling you could use lerping but im not sure how to use lerp.
Here is my code:

This question is an example of a not-so-smart question because it lacks clarity. The person asking the question does not clearly state what the problem is, which makes it difficult to answer the question because the person answering the question would have to assume what the question is. As a result, there will be less activity on this post because no one knows how to answer the question. However, to improve this question we can focus on stating the problem clearly, specifying what help is needed, and including the actual output.

Conclusion

To conclude, asking smart questions is an essential skill to have. The result of asking smart questions is receiving helpful feedback from others so that you can get a better understanding. Additionally, asking smart questions not only helps us but everyone else who may have the same question. So the next time you ask a question, remember to ask a smart one.