Asking why on technical forums

If you spend any time on technical mailing lists or newsgroups, you'll often come across conversations that go something like this:

"How do I frabulate the transfibulator?"

"Why do you want to do that?"

"Why do you care? Just tell me how to frabulate the transfibulator!"

Why should people on technical lists care about the why? Why not just answer the question?

Firstly, and most importantly, because people have an ethical obligation not to give bad advice.

It is foolish to assume that every random poster on the Internet or Usenet is a responsible, intelligent, clear-thinking, sufficiently cautious adult who knows what they are doing. In fact, if you were going to play the odds, you'd bet on them being the complete opposite. This is even true on many of general purpose technical mailing lists (although perhaps not so much on the more elite lists). If frabulating the transfibulator carries risks or serious costs, then the chances are very good that the person asking about it isn't aware of those risks.

It is one thing to give a straight technical answer if it seems that the poster knows what they're doing. There's no reason not to tell someone how to shoot themselves in the foot if they are fully aware of the consequences of doing so; it is another thing altogether if their post indicates that they haven't thought it through and have no idea that they are even pointing the gun at their foot.

If somebody asks for help writing a rotor-based encryption engine (like the World War Two Enigma), it would be sheer irresponsibility to answer their technical question without pointing out that Enigma was broken back in the 1940s and is not even close to secure today. So ask "Why do you want to do that?". If the answer is "I'm storing confidential medical records in a database", then you can gently apply the cluebat. It might be your own medical records you prevent from being stolen. But if the answer is "I'm doing it to obfuscate some data in a game, I know this is weak encryption, but it is good enough for a game", then that's a horse of a different colour.

The second reason for asking "why?" is that it is extremely common for people to ask the wrong question because of a misunderstanding or misapprehension. Some time ago I read an exchange of posts on comp.lang.python started by a programmer who was looking for a faster method to access items in a list. Eventually somebody asked him "Why?", and it turned out that he had assumed that Python lists are linked lists and that item access was a very slow procedure. In fact, Python lists are smart arrays, and item access is exceedingly fast.

If folks had merely answered his technical question, he would have solved a non-problem, learnt nothing, and ended up with slow and inefficient code. His real problem wasn't "How do I this...?". His real problem was that he was labouring under false information, and by asking "Why do you want to do this?", people helped him to solve his real problem.