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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

Disagree, stack overflow is still the best place to get answers to common programming questions. If you need to sort a list in Python it’s much better to find the answer on a short stackoverflow post than to sift through dozens of blogs, each with their own style, or to try to parse pages of documentation that goes into way more detail than you need. No other site has as much content as easy to find as stackoverflow, even if it’s not perfect.

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It is much better to read the official documentation.

People want quick answers, not browsing documentation. SO is useful in the sense that it provides answers to specific questions which a google search finds instantly.

True, but I've seen lots of answers that are "hacks" when there's usually a better, supported way that was spelled out in the docs, e.g. won't fail when you upgrade the library say.

Or they don't want to understand the issue at hand, so they put in a hack, when obtaining a complete understanding of the issue which might take 5 minutes of their time reading the docs, would provide a better solution.

If the docs have examples that cover your use case, which is far from certain.

Exactly. I code in half a dozen different languages that all have their own ways to split a string. When I can't remember the syntax to do this in, say, Python, being able to just say "python split string" and it goes to a reasonable SO answer is a big win for me.

I love reading docs too, so I can get a deeper understanding. But sometimes I just need an answer in a hurry.

Yes, people are lazy, most do not even learn from SO answers. They copy paste, move on, no greater understanding achieved.

I have never enjoyed python’s official documentation. It isn’t easy to find answers. Sometimes the value of an SO answer is that you are sent to exactly the right part of the python docs.

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