Smart Questions Receive Good Answers

Smart questions, their benefits, and their intricacies

Asking smart questions online can help you learn a lot about how others view your situation. By getting the input of more experienced professionals, you can almost replicate their processes, bringing you one step closer to their expertise. The main caveat to this, however, is that not all questions get a good response, if any. Many questions get ignored or given a hasty general answer that is not helpful at all. By asking a question online, you are essentially requesting that a real person take the time out of their leisure to accommodate your needs. Smart questions are constituted by many elements, such as, but not limited to, being specific, resourceful, and relevant. The more elements that you include, the easier it becomes for someone to create a helpful response to your needs.

Questions that aren’t so smart

Often, you will see inquiries on forum pages such as Stack Overflow with no responses. While these may receive a reply eventually, many do not. From a professional’s point of view, many basic questions can be solved with a Google search, or five minutes’ worth of reading isn’t worth answering. Logically, there is no reason to be asking these types of questions; you would get a much faster response from Google, it does not require someone to draft a reply, and the question has likely been answered in the past. If an inquiry is being ignored, it may even encourage the inquirer to do their own research instead of waiting for a reply. Here is a question posted on Stack Overflow that had been ignored, then closed:

Question: “I have an Excel spreadsheet with the .xls extension saved on a network drive. How can I access this spreadsheet from Apache Hop version 2.15?”

Result: 2 hours later, the question was closed, with the reason being “This question is not about programming or software development. It is not currently accepting answers.”

Because this question was not relevant to the forum topic, they did not receive an answer. By asking in the relevant spaces and perhaps including more details on what they may have already attempted to resolve the problem on their own, they would likely see an answer.

The payoff for asking smart questions

Smart questions that are detailed, relevant, and specific are much more likely to see answers that resolve the problem. It should be the requirement for the question to adhere to a specific need, as general questions can always be answered through reading documentation, instructions, or a Google search. Here is an example of a smart question that received a helpful answer. You can view the question in more detail below; the question contained detailed code examples, the compiler settings, things they have attempted, and the error message. Because of this, they were able to receive an answer that you would have difficulty finding through the use of Google or an AI. In the context of software engineering, not every problem is published; many situations are specific enough that they don’t have a universal solution. Asking smart questions on forums such as Stack Overflow can benefit you greatly in troubleshooting these problems and becoming a more knowledgeable engineer.

Question: I’ve nailed down my problem to the following example :

int main()
{
  using nil = decltype(nullptr) ;
  constexpr nil zero = nullptr ;
  constexpr nil other_zero = zero ;
}

Compiling this code with g++ (GCC) 15.2.1 20260103 yields

test.cpp: In function ‘int main()’:
test.cpp:5:30: error: ‘nullptr’ is not a constant expression
    5 |   constexpr nil other_zero = zero ;
      |                              ^~~~

No such error with clang++. Using void* or auto instead of nil removes the error. Is there something I messed up?

Answer: This is a confirmed regression in gcc 15.1 i.e gcc is wrong to reject a well-formed program. Note that gcc’s error says ‘nullptr’ is not a constant expression which is also incorrect because nullptr is actually a constant expression.

This can be seen from expr.const:

1. Certain contexts require expressions that satisfy additional requirements as detailed in this subclause; other contexts have different semantics depending on whether or not an expression satisfies these requirements. Expressions that satisfy these requirements, assuming that copy elision is not performed, are called constant expressions.

2. A variable or temporary object o is constant-initialized if either it has an initializer or its default-initialization results in some initialization being performed, and the full-expression of its initialization is a constant expression when interpreted as a constant-expression, except that if o is an object, that full-expression may also invoke constexpr constructors for o and its subobjects even if those objects are of non-literal class types. A variable is potentially-constant if it is constexpr or it has reference or non-volatile const-qualified integral or enumeration type. A constant-initialized potentially-constant variable V is usable in constant expressions at a point P if V’s initializing declaration D is reachable from P and V is constexpr, V is not initialized to a TU-local value, or P is in the same translation unit as D. This means that the variable zero is usable as a constant expression(for type std::nullptr_t) at the point of the declaration/definition of other_zero.