New Programming Jargon
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
-- had a programming question
-- googled it
-- found the very first (most relevant) link to be to StackOverflow
-- jumped to it
-- found that some other programmer had also asked the same question
-- found that other SO members had given the question and its answers hundreds of bonus points (useful!)
-- and found that the SO mod-nazis had shut it down as "Not considered a good, on-topic question"
An example might be, what are the differences between git and mercurial, where the answer is not a line of code but may include informed judgments by the people whose judgments I'm most interested in. As a developer, I have to make a lot of decisions, and not all of them are about which characters to type.
So I have to live with whatever answers well-informed SO members managed to sneak onto the page before they were chased away and the gate was locked.
Does it seem to anyone else as though there might be something wrong when this happens over and over again?
Now if you have a specific question about some aspect of Git compared to Mercurial, that can work on SE. But as a broad kitchen sink, catch-all, "compare these two giant things kthx", you'd end up with Gorilla vs. Shark.
It is certainly possible to replace SO in this capacity, but it's far from trivial. Of course, whether or not SO should be focusing on foundational education is up to you & company.
So, when trying to get your bearings in a new area or get an idea of what the issues are, asking experienced developers what they think you should know is bad behavior that can't be allowed. The risk is just too high that between the useful answers there might be some that you couldn't use. Better to have no answers than to have that.
StackOverflow should not be about using experienced people as advisors; it should be about using them as documentation.
(Almost) every bit of knowledge that is on StackOverflow can be found elsewhere on the net, too. People go there not because it has knowledge, but because of its density.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/247621/what-are-the-corre...
Asked and answered by your number 1 user, John Skeet. Basically he had specific detailed information to share, and he did it by asking and answering his own question. Something encouraged by Joel on the old podcasts if I remember correctly. Hugely upvoted, so the community thought it was great, but one of your moderators closed it as "not constructive". This is endemic at Stackoverflow. As SiVal points out, the best material on the site is routinely shut down. How does this make any sense? I have 2k8 rep points and used to visit often, but I find the excessive moderation hugely off-putting and I now rarely visit.
You make the following points for why they shouldn't appear on SO
- Nobody needs to know the answer to this question. -> There will always be someone looking for the answer in question. Surely a lot of people would like to know it still. I googled "Git vs Mercurial" and it has 965.000 results. I suppose at least few people thought it was worth discussing.
- It’s not nearly specific enough. -> A or B. Seems specific enough to me. And the difference in the opinions and experience of the those who answer will bring a depth and specificity that can not be found on Wikipedia or a blog post. If all the answers in life were as easy as A or B, life would be a lot easier.
- It is difficult to learn from these questions. -> This is where I disagree the most with you. A person who hasn't used one of both will surely gain some insights why or why not to use A or B
- It drives away experts. -> I only see it attracting people as there are lots of votes. Of course that doesn't disproof your claim. But perhaps you can show us the numbers? Do you see a disproportionate larger amount of votes from people with less points?
What I think are good reasons are: - Perhaps you want the site to remain clean Q&A not Q&O(pinion) - You want to avoid opinion battles as they can get out of hand
As for the opinion battles. I can understand. But I still value the opinions. And whether an opinion is constructive should be measured by it's upvotes. But the clean just Q&A. As I said earlier. There isn't always a clean cut answer to a question. Life would be a lot easier if it was.
And to answer the Gorilla vs Shark question the answer is obvious. If you're on land the Gorilla will win. If you're in the water the Shark will win. And that's what you can learn from such a question. That's what someone is looking for if he's Googling for "Gorilla vs Shark"
SO has a narrow purpose. There are many good questions that don't belong there. The git vs. mercurial question (and most similar questions) would be a better fit for programmers.se (and it is almost exactly the need quora is looking to fill).
It doesn't matter if it's informative, useful or, oh horror of horrors, entertaining, all that matters is that it is Right(TM) or Wrong(TM) in the eyes of those high on their power trip, and there is no point in debating it.
And no Jeff, most communities don't just tend towards increased strictness over time, they tend towards death and abandonment, no matter how big they were at the height of their popularity. Stifling the natural development of a community because it doesn't match your "vision" rarely works out well, both online and IRL.
I've never understood why Jeff and Joel felt these kinds of questions should be anathema on Stack Overflow. Most of the information on Stack Overflow exists in some form or other elsewhere. The value-add that Stack Overflow provides is community-based filtering and maintenance. Not only are these questions entertaining in their own right, but their very existence enhances the feeling of community on the site.
Also, it wasn't as though they were using some off-the-shelf software to run the site. They could have provided an outlet for this kind of thing, which all communities want to do, within the context of the site.
I actually think that it is rude and disrespectful to your community to shut a topic down that has nothing blatantly wrong with it (like flaming/cussing/banality) just because it isn't the correct "fit" and might (shocker) involve an opinion.
I can't help wondering that if SO continues in this vein, how relevant it is going to be in the near future.
we don't have a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live
Make a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live! StackOverflowOverflow.
Sigh. This deletionism accomplishes nothing.
Frat row is, y'know, over there. Slightly off campus.
Anyway, frat row was pretty far off main campus (sorry, "the lawn") where I went to college, at UVa.
For me, one of the biggest advantages of the college classroom over the high school one was that digressions, side topics, and open-ended discussion occured far more frequently in my college classrooms than in my high school classrooms. Think of it as the difference between being taught to a test and just learning things. There still needs to be some moderation so that things stay focused overall, but often those side trails spark some really interesting, useful discussions. Education doesn't have to be narrow.
I don't think the jargon question example from the article here is well suited for even a looser SO, as it's more entertainment than education, but there are lots of productive questions that don't have black and white answers that I've still enjoyed seeing SO discuss.
The problem there is, where does the motivation for people to provide you with "your answer" come from?
Do you really think there's pool of people out there who think "Maybe RegEx has a problem at work today, I'll just go check StackOverflow to see if I can answer todays question for him."?
Or do you think it's more likely there are a bunch of people interested in various coding topics, who enjoy discussing problems and solutions? How long do you supposed that second group of people will hang around if "strict moderation" starts deleting any "interesting discussion", because questioners are complaining "I just want my damned answer!"?
Sure, StackOverflow reputation points are one source of motivation, but if I had the choice between getting my questions answered by people wishing to maximise their StackOverflow reputation, and getting my questions discussed by people who're interested and engaged experts in the field - I'd join the second discussion every time.
Discussions over the best solutions happen frequently on SO. Poor solutions are criticized, good solutions are expanded upon.
> The problem there is, where does the motivation for people to provide you with "your answer" come from?
Easy. Some people just love to educate. I love to educate - I write tutorials frequently. Some people use SO to educate, while others use forums.
If you're looking for a system that is designed to solicit discussion, Stack Exchange is not that. Not by a long shot. It's kind of the ... opposite of that.
That way there would be a place for people to have these discussions while keeping it separate from stack-overflow?
Entertaining? Sure.
Is there a sanctioned place for people to post this sort of meta-programmer stuff? You find little scraps of it from time to time, is there a stack exchange site that can be used for fun stuff?
I actually learnt a bunch from those jargon examples - I'll certainly start using some of them at work. Jargon exists to make communication more efficient - I just learned a bunch of new ways to communicate about my craft.
You have to ignore your users sometimes, and maybe this is one of those times. But if you are getting a consistent message from your users that they're unhappy, I hope you're at least listening.
Characterizing the people who want more reasonable^H^H^H^H^H lenient moderation on SO as wanting a frat house atmosphere makes me think you're not really listening.
Some people have an intuition that the presence of these historical bits contributes to a reduction in quality. I think that intuition is mistaken. Who knows who is right or even if that's a meaningful thing to ask. We're just discussing preferences.
The mob is always happy to stoop to lower levels of discourse. It cannot be trusted to govern itself as a site grows. And most of the Internet is more than willing to cater to this out of fear of losing visitors. I say bravo. Let the 'gregarious' go elsewhere and live in the land of forum signatures, endless bike shedding, and editor wars once again.
The only questions on SO are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong. For me, SO has no value. /r/programming doesn't have any value either, but that doesn't make SO better.
There is a huge opportunity for a quality, ruthlessly moderated programming-centric discussion site. I'd argue that an aggregator is suboptimal over the long term due to the economic structure of the Internet favoring eyeballs over quality content.
I do agree that SO quality sucks at times, though.
I really think moderation is the best choice.
Yogi Berra described the situation as "Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded".
Sample: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14827/typical...
The highest upvoted user got 122 points for that question.
if(3 = x)
If you make a habit of making the left side of == immutable, the compiler will let you know when you type = instead. Of course, gcc throws a warning unless you type if((x = 3)) if you genuinely want to do the assignment inside the if, which works just as well but requires tool support.
So, no, not that important. But i actually think it looks nice.
if("test".equals(environment)){
vs
if(environment != null && environment.equals("test")){
aString.equals("SOMETHING") will throw an exception if aString is null, while "SOMETHING".equals(aString) will just return false.
In some cases, that's one 'if' less to write.
This is part of why dependent typing (as seen in Idris and co.) is so interesting: you can actually require, for example, that implementations of the equality interface are commutative, and this will be statically checked by the compiler.
headlessCamels and ProudCamels for verbally differentiating between the two different types of camelCase (or CamelCase)
(which was in the extended scrape of the original question: http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&serv... )
This also reminds me of a House M.D. episode where House is on a plane without his team, so he has to get a regular person to talk to, to finally solve the case.
I think the idea is: you report a bug in code that I wrote, and I (childishly) retaliate by reporting a bug in code that you wrote (the bug I report is then a 'Counterbug')
The result is, if something goes wrong, all you get is grayness, what follows is run Visual Studio, reproduce the bug, make sure that now catches exceptions before you, and hope it's not a heisenbug...
And then the content, which is a mirror of the deleted question.
Pick whichever part interests you.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't call an array of proposed/observed novel jargon that either, regardless of its source.
At the same time, I am torn, because you can learn a little bit from content like this. And the audience loves it. If we didn't have any systems in place to tamp down on poll/survey/opinion questions, Stack Overflow would be virtually nothing but those kinds of question. They are INSANELY popular.
8. Heisenbug Source: Unknown A computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when an attempt is made to study it.
On the other note - I personally think most online communities tend to get more lenient overtime. I'd be interested in any further reading on that matter.
Timing-related errors make the worst heisenbugs. I had one once where pausing through the code caused the code to work, so I cobbled together a quick debug logging facility for it, and that still caused the code to work just fine. Anything that altered the code by more than a few milliseconds of execution time caused it to work OK.
I stared at it for a while and then rewrote the entire block in disgust.
I know one multiplayer Flash service has a problem where their server clocks had drifted apart, and it caused all sorts of crazy issues. Took them a couple of weeks to figure it out and fix the problem. Not quite a Heisenbug maybe, but close. (http://playerio.com/forum/multiplayer/room-disappears-from-l...)
I've had bugs before that have seemed to come and go for absolutely no reason - I think they involved corrupted incremental compilations, but who knows.
Rob Pike mentioned this: http://commandcenter.blogspot.ro/2010/08/know-your-science.h...
It's possible, provided you're careful about how you do it and thoughtful in your approach.
Basically, if a question can have (and will eventually accrete) infinite answers, that's a problem for a Q&A system, unless it is Q&A in name only.
Seriously though, there's not a good argument for deleting it. There are plenty of terrible, off-topic, garbage questions on there to be closed. Why focus the few that, while probably off-format, result in entertaining (and sometimes) enlightening results? Sure, if the site was flooded with posts like that, then maybe. Maybe.
But its not. Its just one group deciding to be pedantic. Nothing more.