From my understanding of the term, a smart question is essentially a question that is both informative and straight to the point. A typical smart question would address the exact problem that the person is having while also giving a rundown on what exactly they’re doing. The purpose of this is so that any other developer would be able to look over what they’re doing and point out what went wrong. Without any of the information that a smart question should have, then any potential helpers wouldn’t be able to pin point what went wrong. In other words, both sides get absolutely nothing from asking the question.
Here is an example of a smart question: Click Here
This user is asking how they can write a a recursive function to find the number of elements greater than 30 in the list. They reiterate what they want to accomplish, then present the code that they’ve already written. This here is a smart question as they asked exactly what they wanted to know and provided developers their code so that the other developers may look at it and point out what’s wrong. There was only just enough information provided in the question to allow other developers to successfully help them. Also, it was extremely easy to read; a wall of text would probably just drive anyone else away.
Here is what I believe to be a dumb question: Click Here
To summarize what the post was about, the user is asking why a for loop isn’t working when nested inside another for loop. They provided the code and below it, they proceeded to copy paste the following line repeatedly: “The promblem is if I make it outside the nested loop it works!? the promblem in the nested loop but what is it?”. Now, the first thing that makes it a dumb question is their title: “Why it doesn’t enter to the condition”. They included the code, which is very good, but that they did the copy paste thing that I’ve mentioned before. It really confused me and I alost didn’t bother reading it, and I only did so for the purpose of this essay. Now, while it is a dumb question, anyone is still able to answer their question; but only because their code has a comment pin pointing the part that they say isn’t working, which really is enough for anyone to help.