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By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition woul

by aaronem 13y ago

By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes.

VLM 13y ago
Theoretical mechanism would look something like noob who could someday write detailed comprehensive treatments of some Clojure topic tries to get started, sees 99% of his available resources for help are java oriented, eh, better stick with java in case I need help later on, and the possibility of noob growing up to be clojure author of a detailed treatment has disappeared. "The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes." Its one of many effective ways to start learning a language, although not the only way. To distort or screw something up, you don't necessarily have to mess up 100% of the population, just a good chunk of them. You could try to argue that few to no experts ever took their first steps as cookbook script kiddies, but I don't think that would be successful.
- testrun 13y ago
  This does not make sense whatsoever. You don't go to SO to get a feel for a language. You go to SO to get quick answers for a problem you are having for a language already chosen.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Some languages are better supported and have broader ecosystems than others, and for a given language this tends to be self-perpetuating as a result of its effect on the languages which people choose to learn and use. This you blame on Stack Exchange? I concede the model is less than perfect, but really. And you seem to mistake knowing languages for understanding programming. The essence of the skill is the ability to formally specify an algorithm which solves a given problem; the rest, more or less, is libraries and syntax.

by aaronem 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

Theoretical mechanism would look something like noob who could someday write detailed comprehensive treatments of some Clojure topic tries to get started, sees 99% of his available resources for help are java oriented, eh, better stick with java in case I need help later on, and the possibility of noob growing up to be clojure author of a detailed treatment has disappeared. "The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes." Its one of many effective ways to start learning a language, although not the only way. To distort or screw something up, you don't necessarily have to mess up 100% of the population, just a good chunk of them. You could try to argue that few to no experts ever took their first steps as cookbook script kiddies, but I don't think that would be successful.

testrun 13y ago
This does not make sense whatsoever. You don't go to SO to get a feel for a language. You go to SO to get quick answers for a problem you are having for a language already chosen.
aaronem 13y ago
Some languages are better supported and have broader ecosystems than others, and for a given language this tends to be self-perpetuating as a result of its effect on the languages which people choose to learn and use. This you blame on Stack Exchange? I concede the model is less than perfect, but really. And you seem to mistake knowing languages for understanding programming. The essence of the skill is the ability to formally specify an algorithm which solves a given problem; the rest, more or less, is libraries and syntax.