I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the topi

I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the topic, or repeat what others might have said 10 pages back? There are many phpboard like forums dedicated for games, linux etc which are of this nature. For a more controlled kind of discussions, the current preeminent site for such activity is stackexchange. Sure, it has its flaws - its strictly qna style, is filled with elitist and intolerant mods - but for most questions that are not of the form "how to do X with API Y on platform Z", you will find discussion in comments. Even on stackoverflow which primarily encourages questions of the above form, there are enough discussions. The softwareenginering site is much better for slightly opinionated discussions disguised as questions and answers; so are workplace, unix etc.