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The goal of SO is to have questions with ONE correct answer, and to have that answer there. Any question - such as this one - where the answer is "it depends"

The goal of SO is to have questions with ONE correct answer, and to have that answer there. Any question - such as this one - where the answer is "it depends" better be a work of art, or have an answer that explores all the considerations in exquisite detail, or it's going to get closed. Because there's no "one right answer" to this question. It's "on topic", but not a good question.

genwin 14y ago
If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor. That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".
- icebraining 14y ago
  The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/
  - genwin 14y ago
    Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.
  - codeka 14y ago
    It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss. But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)

genwin 14y ago

If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor. That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".

icebraining 14y ago
The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/
- genwin 14y ago
  Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.
- codeka 14y ago
  It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss. But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)