I wouldn't necessarily agree with you, Erik.

It's like a begger on the street asking for money. He does a disservice to society by being unproductive which is a bad thing and should be discouraged. But the person that gives him a few dollars is being generous. Some may say that the answer is "tough love" and that by refusing to give the begger a few dollars the begger will eventually be forced to do something productive to earn a living (if he doesn't resort to theft or violence). But that comes down to a matter of opinion and I certainly wouldn't want someone to hit me over the head with a baseball bat because I chose to give the begger a few dollars in a moment of generosity on my part.

Heck, sometimes I'll give a begger on the corner a few pesos and sometimes I'll be of the attitude that by giving him money I'm only contributing to the problem. My attitude on that literally changes every day.

I may be out of sync with the rest of the forum but my problem with "gimme code" isn't the fact that they're asking for code but that they're asking for code without even showing they've made a minimal effort to solve it themselves. If I see a nice, lengthy message explaining what someone has tried and what didn't work and showing their code and I have a nice code snippet that solves the problem, why not share it?

It's not the answer or the code being provided that is the problem, it's the original question.

The "Gimme Code" score was meant for messages that are begging for code. I don't think anyone should ever be punished for contributing something. After all, we have a code library with ready-to-use code that I'm sure some people and even students just grab without even understanding. Are we to get rid of the code library to make sure everyone does their homework?

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster