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Every HN conversation about Stack Overflow is full of carping, so I feel obliged to say: I love Stack Overflow. It has saved me days of work, and I've really en

Every HN conversation about Stack Overflow is full of carping, so I feel obliged to say: I love Stack Overflow. It has saved me days of work, and I've really enjoyed helping people when I could. It was a revolution, and I would hate to return to the days of searching old phpbb forums for help (and if I was really desperate creating yet another account to ask something myself). I've been on the site since the beginning, although my participation waxes and wanes. I often only check the "bounty" tab for tags I care about, since those tend to be better-asked questions. That's one way to engage off-and-on without much effort. When I do look through the non-bounty questions, I find a lot of beginners. Some questions are so badly-asked I won't engage, but a lot of questions show someone trying who is just not yet knowledgeable enough to know the right approach, or even how to ask for help. I feel like those are the most fun to answer. I could probably mark them all as duplicates somehow, but where is the fun in that? I'd rather offer an answer tailored to their own situation, possibly with links to other SO answers that elaborate on relevant (not "duplicate") topics. Joel's post here actually sounds less hard-line against duplicates than the Stack Overflow conventional wisdom. It sound like what he really cares about is whether the asker is trying. Personally I have never marked a question as a duplicate, because there is usually some room to explain how that other question applies to the asker's situation. With Rust I've been on the other side of that exchange, too. That is really the only region of Stack Overflow where I've seen the pedantry and unhelpfulness that others complain about---mostly from one person actually. And I wonder how many people have given up on Rust because of bad experiences there. What looks like a duplicate to an experienced developer may seem totally unrelated to a beginner. When your question is marked as a duplicate you get this sinking feeling of hopelessness, like someone is saying, "I can see the problem, but I won't tell you, and I'll make sure no one else sees your question either. Good bye!" Knowing what it feels like makes me even more inclined to answer every question in its uniqueness. And it is very rewarding to help someone out of their bind! Another fun question is the "Something is failing and I don't know why" type. If you have a lot of experience with that tech, you might be able to recognize the problem or guess it from little information. These questions are like fun puzzles, and they let you show off a bit of "magic". Anyway, every time I see a HN post about Stack Overflow, I want to write this comment. Joel, Jeff, and everyone else there: thank you so much for a huge gift to developers everywhere!

rspeer 9y ago
> With Rust I've been on the other side of that exchange, too. That is really the only region of Stack Overflow where I've seen the pedantry and unhelpfulness that others complain about---mostly from one person actually. And I wonder how many people have given up on Rust because of bad experiences there. You're not wrong! I almost gave up on learning Rust when I saw all the belittling answers on Stack Overflow. It particularly seemed common to see SO pages of the form: - Q: How do I do [thing X that Rust doesn't do well yet] in Rust? - A: You're doing it wrong! Write better code! You're only trying to do X because you're sloppy. And then thing X would actually become possible in Rust, because the language keeps getting better, but the SO page would remain, implying that only bad programmers do this thing that works in Rust and that you want to do. Fortunately, I've realized that this guy on SO doesn't represent the Rust community. The community on Reddit is pretty good, and on the Gitter, there are people who are happy to answer even simple questions that have been asked before.

rspeer 9y ago

> With Rust I've been on the other side of that exchange, too. That is really the only region of Stack Overflow where I've seen the pedantry and unhelpfulness that others complain about---mostly from one person actually. And I wonder how many people have given up on Rust because of bad experiences there. You're not wrong! I almost gave up on learning Rust when I saw all the belittling answers on Stack Overflow. It particularly seemed common to see SO pages of the form: - Q: How do I do [thing X that Rust doesn't do well yet] in Rust? - A: You're doing it wrong! Write better code! You're only trying to do X because you're sloppy. And then thing X would actually become possible in Rust, because the language keeps getting better, but the SO page would remain, implying that only bad programmers do this thing that works in Rust and that you want to do. Fortunately, I've realized that this guy on SO doesn't represent the Rust community. The community on Reddit is pretty good, and on the Gitter, there are people who are happy to answer even simple questions that have been asked before.