Stackoverflow attention, PHP vs other languages | Hacker News Reader

Stackoverflow attention, PHP vs other languages

7 pointsmorganwilde7 comments

Recently I started learning Python (used to do PHP before), this gave me a fresh perspective on stackoverflow.com and I began wondering is it just me?

Whenever I had questions about PHP or JS, the views quickly racked up to ~20-30 in seconds and I had an answer or a few in a less than 15 minutes. Now after posting my third Python related question, I'm starting to see a pattern of meaningfully less views and few, if any, answers/comments.

If you look at the number of questions, PHP with ~346K and Python with ~165K, that is kinda what you should expect. So does this mean that when it comes to vibrancy and rapid attention, PHP is as good as it gets on stackoverflow?

P.S. I did look up Java and Javascript, which by the numbers seem to equal PHP.

View on HN

I spend a fair amount of time in the Python StackOverflow tag. I've noticed that questions which ask about dealing with third party modules tend to get fewer answers/views than questions that deal exclusively with problems that can be solved within the Python standard libraries.

It looks like all of your python related questions deal with third party libraries.

You obviously know how to ask decent questions on StackOverflow, as I can see you're providing good code examples. In the case where you're dealing with third party modules in Python, I would suggest taking the extra step of including links to the documentation/tutorials that got you to the point you're at.

Too true, unfortunate as it may be, but I don't think many people have that much experience in third-party Python libraries. Your best bet is to try and find examples from the source or find somewhere that uses it. I've had the same problems myself, a lot of the bigger libraries like Django etc. have good documentation, so its usually not a problem.

As funny as it may sound, I was a bit intimidated by Django and thus choose to go for Flask instead for my first steps. There is no rationale behind this, just some strange feeling. Thought I'd mention.

This is a superbly useful advice, thank you. As a side note, 3rd party modules is something unavoidable in web python, at least from my experience (unlike PHP, where you can go plain vanilla easily), so I thought it would be like an organic part of the Python community.

P.s. in the mean time I did get one answer.

Can you link your questions?

I don't know about using Stackoverflow for Python, but because there are so many active Python mailing lists, Google and gmane search might also be a good bet. (http://search.gmane.org/)

Sure, here's the link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14965973/how-to-access-sq...

Usually stackoverflow is the place I go to when I've exhausted my search options, but still thanks for the link (gmane), I was not aware of it.

funny i was just reading this question on SO and someone answered it before I could!!

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