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>They're absolutely essential to the software dev community I disagree. I'm of the opinion that it's useful only if you're doing something you've no clue abou

>They're absolutely essential to the software dev community I disagree. I'm of the opinion that it's useful only if you're doing something you've no clue about and also don't want to gain a clue about. It's no surprise, then, that WWW garbage is typical, since it's poorly documented and a ''living standard'' and other nonsense. If you're like me and use real languages with real standards and good books available, you're probably not going to need something such as this. I've never asked a question there and I've never needed to look at a Common Lisp question and answer; I don't think there are many Common Lisp questions and answers in general, actually. Similarly, I don't see these for APL, either. I don't believe it's a coincidence that these languages are well-documented and encourage understanding to use. Meanwhile, ''Why does JavaScript do this?'' or ''I can't get my CSS to do this in Safari.'', sure, I can see that.

Nextgrid 7y ago
Disagreed. Even if you are lucky to use a language where the official documentation is very good, there’s still a chance that you run into some issue that isn’t covered by it or is out of scope. My personal example is an issue installing a third-party Python library on a certain macOS version. I wouldn’t expect this to be in the official docs considering it’s a bug in the OS (more specifically where the unofficial package manager puts C libraries), but it’s still an issue that’s preventing me from getting stuff done. StackOverflow had an unanswered question about it, and similar questions (with answers) for other libraries. With those answers I was able to solve my problem and post an answer to that original library. It’s still earning upvotes 2 years later suggesting it’s being useful to quite a few people. There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind). In a perfect world we would have one authoritative source for docs and all implementations would follow it. We’re not in a perfect world, so the next best thing is a site where new people can ask questions and people experienced with the issue at hand can share their knowledge.
- verisimilitudes 7y ago
  In my opinion, Python doesn't belong in the same category as Common Lisp and APL. >There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind). I already agreed that JavaScript and CSS are good languages for Stack Overflow.
lispm 7y ago
Questions: 4850 for CL https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/common-lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/common-lisp 5798 for Lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lisp 6786 for Scheme https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scheme https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scheme Other languages: 90K Scala, 1.5M Java, 1.8M Javascript, 1.5k Smalltalk, 10k Prolog, 1.6k Ada, 235k Swift, 1.2M Python, 1.3M C#

Nextgrid 7y ago

Disagreed. Even if you are lucky to use a language where the official documentation is very good, there’s still a chance that you run into some issue that isn’t covered by it or is out of scope. My personal example is an issue installing a third-party Python library on a certain macOS version. I wouldn’t expect this to be in the official docs considering it’s a bug in the OS (more specifically where the unofficial package manager puts C libraries), but it’s still an issue that’s preventing me from getting stuff done. StackOverflow had an unanswered question about it, and similar questions (with answers) for other libraries. With those answers I was able to solve my problem and post an answer to that original library. It’s still earning upvotes 2 years later suggesting it’s being useful to quite a few people. There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind). In a perfect world we would have one authoritative source for docs and all implementations would follow it. We’re not in a perfect world, so the next best thing is a site where new people can ask questions and people experienced with the issue at hand can share their knowledge.

verisimilitudes 7y ago
In my opinion, Python doesn't belong in the same category as Common Lisp and APL. >There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind). I already agreed that JavaScript and CSS are good languages for Stack Overflow.

lispm 7y ago

Questions: 4850 for CL https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/common-lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/common-lisp 5798 for Lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lisp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lisp 6786 for Scheme https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scheme https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scheme Other languages: 90K Scala, 1.5M Java, 1.8M Javascript, 1.5k Smalltalk, 10k Prolog, 1.6k Ada, 235k Swift, 1.2M Python, 1.3M C#