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> It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate. Clearly I'm becoming a dinosaur. Back in the days there were newsgroups
by magicalhippo 3y ago
> It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate.
Clearly I'm becoming a dinosaur. Back in the days there were newsgroups and IRC. What do the non-dinos use these days?
Like, not long ago I was looking for a library to X in language Y. Most of my questions are like that, so SO is almost never a fit for me. And I'd love to get some input from people who have tried the alternatives.
So yeah, where's the plethora of places to ask for such things?
- TillE 3y agoI guess there's Reddit, but I've generally found poor results (ie, few responses) for such questions. These days I'd generally start with "awesome" lists on GitHub, use number of stars as a coarse filter to exclude obscure stuff, then dig into the documentation of each of the alternatives. It works ok, but I really would like to have a better way of finding opinions about libraries or whatever.
- wizofaus 3y agoSilly question, but have you tried ChatGPT?
- dagw 3y agoI have, and the results are more misses than hits. Up to including recommending libraries that don't actually exist.
- magicalhippo 3y agoI have not, because most often I don't have the experience to evaluate the response. That is, I don't trust it to know what's what, so I'd have to do an in-depth evaluation anyway. For discovering the options it's probably ok, but the value I got from newsgroups and IRC were the experiences behind the opinions, potentially saving me from doing in-depth evaluations.
- wizofaus 3y agoSure, but it's still surprisingly good for most programming type questions. Even if the answer isn't exactly right or ideal it often gives you enough to go on to figure it out yourself.