An idea by CL, suggested on the page titled Effective ways to request help with Tcl-related problems.
Some suggestions:
Whoops... (jcw quickly recovers and removes the false start...)
Before we go farther, CL should mention that he had a quite different notion in mind. This is the model context: a developer is working on a program. His results don't satisfy him. He decides it's time to seek outside help. How does he communicate to his colleagues the problem?
I claim a crucial notion in this communication is that of the "minimal example". The programmer might require a GUI that displays certain files and their characteristics. Perhaps he doesn't know how to program this. If he says, "I can't make it work!" and stops there, he's unlikely either to receive prompt help, nor to make much progress on his own.
If, however, he says, "I think I can handle the GUI part, and I know how to sort the results, and decorate the framistan, but the heart of my difficult is that when I use the command
exec ls *.$extension
I get [specific error message] rather than the list of files I expect", then chances are someone will answer him crisply and effectively within seconds. I call the ordered triple of "exec ls *.$extension", the expected response, and the observed response, a "minimal example" of the programmer's problem.