Once upon a time I was in high school.  Ah, the halcyon days of my youth.  And one day I was sitting in class, minding my own business when the teacher said:

"Does anyone have a thin metal ruler?"

No answer.  Apparently no one had a thin metal ruler.

"No?  How about a nail file?"

No answer.  Now, I cannot imagine that of all the girls in the class, not one of them had a nail file.  But I can well imagine that none of them wanted to share it with a teacher.

"No?  Hmm."

So I piped up: "What do you need a nail file for?"

"I have this big staple in this document that I need to remove."

Upon which point one of my classmates mentioned that he had a staple remover in his pencil case.  Problem solved.

Over and over again I find that script customers (both internal consumers here at Microsoft and third-party developers) frequently ask questions like my teacher.  That is, they have a preconceived notion of how the problem is going to be solved, and then ask the necessary questions to implement their preconceived solution.  And in many cases this is a pretty good technique!  Had someone actually brought a thin metal ruler to class, the problem would have been solved.   But by choosing a question that emphasizes the solution over the problem, the questioner loses all ability to leverage the full knowledge of the questionees.

When someone asks me a question about the script technologies I almost always turn right around and ask them why they want to know.  I might be able to point them at some tool that better solves their problem.  And I might also learn something about what problems people are trying to solve with my tools.

Joel Spolsky once said that people don't want drills, they want holes.  As a drill provider, I'm fascinated to learn what kinds of holes people want to put in what kinds of materials, so to speak.  And sometimes people think they want a drill when in fact they want a rotary cutter...