Comment by JdeBP
3 years ago
Mark-Jason Dominus was the root cause of the "XY" name, inadvertently.
I, Raymond Chen, Charles Cazabon, and Eric S. Raymond didn't use that name at all.
A lot of people foolishly chose to go with "XY", because they thought that what we were saying was silly. I even had bloody foolish people on Stack Exchange complain that I wasn't using the sensible name "XY", when I was one of the people who wrote about this stuff in the first place long before that name appeared. I shouldn't be renaming what was known as the "XY Problem" to silly names, they demanded.
But that was the point that Mark-Jason Dominus and I were making.
Calling it something as mundane as "XY" loses an essential part of the concept, which is that the actual question as posed makes no logical sense and blatantly doesn't fit what the things being asked about do. All of the people complaining that they've posed questions that make logical sense and then been accused of "XY" problems would likely not have been accused of using chocolate covered bananas to integrate European currency systems. It's in part the people who missed our point and pushed to rename to "XY" who have caused all this pain for you who now complain that you're being told that your questions are "XY Problems".
Chocolate covered bananas and European currency systems nicely communicate the fact that it's not just mundane "X" and "Y", but it's two things that prima facie make no logical sense together. I stressed this three times in my FGA. Mark-Jason Dominus used "logically nonsensical" too.
The headlined page here misses this, and waters it down to "seems like a strange problem to want to solve". It's not that the problems are strange and unusual to the answerers. It's that they are nonsense.
I've never used the "XY" name, myself, and I recommend its avoidance.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
You can probably have the name back for that problem.
The Stack Overflow XY problem and resulting XY problem problem are different:
1. Someone is assigned to accomplish task Y
2. … within an established project based on facility X.
3. There is a sub-task of Y, say Z, for which X is ill-suited.
4. They come into the group and ask ‘how can I use X to accomplish Z?’
with responses that amount to ‘get a different job.’
The "chocolate covered bananas and European currency systems problem" is certainly more accurate, but in terms of naming things, it's automatically disqualified because it's way too long to be usable in any context. So the "XY problem" wins by default. Maybe if you had titled it the "CCB-ECS problem" it would have caught on. Or something less abstract and chocolatey. Naming things sure is hard.
[flagged]
> Just answer the fricking question or I'll replace you with a bot.
Please do, it'll save everyone a lot of time and headache, especially if this is representative of your usual mode of communication.
If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen. Real engineers find solutions to ill-posed problems every day.
> Using chocolate-covered bananas to integrate European currency systems is a metaphorical scenario, so let's explore it creatively.
> Remember, this creative exercise is not a practical strategy for integrating European currency systems
Sounds like it XYed you.
It most certainly did not. XY'ing me would be stating that the question is a waste of my and their time and an answer wouldn't help me and then choosing not to answer, as was the suggested approach. It is pompous and shitty behavior so call it what it is.