&gt; Ask yourself, would this be the answer you give to a 12 year old girl who&#x27;s taken an early interest in programming? Or a single mother who&#x27;s trying to switch careers to improve her lot in life? Or your own mother, for that matter? Is it really constructive to be so abrasive?<p>An important bit of context is implicit in both your comments, and I think the context is <i>different</i>, which is where some of the differences in your stances are.<p>It&#x27;s very important to know the purpose of the asker when answering a question.  If the little girl or a single mother are trying to accomplish a single thing, right now, and their <i>purpose is not to learn</i>, then yes, just answer the question or don&#x27;t bother commenting.  If their <i>purpose seems to be to learn</i>, then teaching them both skills on how to better teach themselves and on better ways to approach the problem are ultimately more useful.<p>Does it really help that single mother trying to switch careers more to be told how to fix her HTML parsing regex[1], or would she be better served with a suggestion on a library that provided a more sane way to accomplish that capability?  Of course, as a community we could do better at being more civil, and providing <i>both</i> answers, but if ever there was a place where the &quot;teach a man to fish&quot; parable fit, this is it.<p>1: Not to start an inflammatory discussion on that.  I regularly use regexen to parse well formed specific HTML pages.  The trick is knowing where it&#x27;s appropriate and where it&#x27;s not.