Expert asterisks

Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.As an example, here was an interaction about git: a new learner was having trouble getting properly oriented. They were asking how branches relate to directories, and how to undo a change. They knew about git init but didn’t know how it related to changing projects. newb: so every time I change project I simply do ‘git init’ on them? expert1: ‘git init’ is for creating a new project. expert2: you change your working directory, typically, when you change project So far so good, but then: expert2: or you specify the git repo directory with the -C switch, but it’s more typing to do, so hardly anyone does that unless there’s a very good reason What!? Why mention this while explicitly pointing out no one does it? The…

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