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> My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. Remember that SO's main traffi
by jldugger 9y ago
> My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve.
Remember that SO's main traffic source isn't experts, it's novices searching for answers. I did some digging at one point, and the most popular questions on ServerFault are extremely basic, like 'how to make a symlink' basic (viewed 1 million times https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a-file-in-linux https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a...). If you're a developer or student just trying to figure out this one UNIX thing so you can get back to JavaScript or CS:Go or whatever, this is great.
- d23 9y agoI agree and appreciate that, but I don't know that it's always true. The problem is that a lot of documentation and man pages out there just aren't written well. They bury the lede and make you dig around to figure out how to do that simple thing you want to do. Googling for something and immediately finding that specific question on SO even if you could go look it up in pages of docs is a time saver. Edit: Or perhaps the library has poor usability. I've been doing python programming for 6 years now and know the standard library like the back of my hand, but if I have to do anything reasonably complex with datetime you can bet I'll probably just look for someone on SO that has had the same problem and crib the answer.
- tajen 9y agoDocumentation should contain a complete reference off all options. StackOverflow rather describes... usecases. It sounds fine to me, because the programmer can't think about all usecases, so they better be on a user-managed website.