As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable. I was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there. I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be answering questions there.

Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.

I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.

Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it. Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wa...