18 ms·

StackOverflow closed my question, that's why we exist

83 points by diegoloop 13y ago

bdfh42 13y ago
But you could reduce the JavaScript style guide entries to just "Use JSLint and do what it says". Perhaps the others are more helpful or perhaps (more likely) other languages do not have Lint. I am sure there is more to it but does not require lengthier posts - perhaps essays?
- diegoloop 13y ago
  This is just an alternative for guidelines! It's like asking the developers what they really use in their daily code. ... I implemented so, that the title and the language are required, the description is not, so you can just have. Use PascalCase for methods. and added the C# tag, for example
  - bdfh42 13y ago
    Ok - but do you think that (continuing the example) the JavaScript entries do add up to something more than just what Lint says to do? Cos I can see it. I do think there are benefits in more assistance for people with style and structure - I was just wondering if a longer format would suite the need better.
    - diegoloop 13y ago
      I think there is no right or wrong in writing code, it's a matter of style, so at CSG you have different alternatives and you can just pick what you think is most convenient for your code! I dont understand what you mean by "if a longer format would suite the need better"
      - bdfh42 13y ago
        Surely "style" is more than "use === not ==". That's a tip - and perhaps not worth a lot as a tip if there is not a full explanation to back it up. "Why not?" and "What's wrong with that?" Does not style devolve from structure? Hmn - maybe Structure devolves from Style. Tricky - thus I think that without a "long form" explanation of what you are trying to achieve and thus how each "tip" fits into the objectives then the contribution is lessened. The original objective was to write "better" programs in a new language - a very worthy objective but without analyzing what "better" means and how any component contributes to "better" then I am not clear how you have advanced things. I laud your objectives - and was just wondering about (grin) the style.
kozhevnikov 13y ago
Isn't that what codereview.stackexchange.com is for?
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Not at all, Coding Style Guide is not a Q&A site. This is more of opinion. I just focused in guidelines (best/bad practices, conventions, standards, and so on...) The idea is to make the code universally readable for anyone!
JeremyMorgan 13y ago
Great idea, but in order to succeed you need to make the guidelines editable like a wiki, and make the accounts something someone already has. For example, - https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide - https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards These are editable by anyone and people already on GitHub so it makes it easy. I don't want to rain on your parade, I think the site is a great idea, just expressing what I think it would need to succeed. I was trying to go to about or sign up and it timed out, I'll be back later to check it out.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Oh yes, please! It looks like Amazon is having troubles to handle too many requests. Thank you very much for your feedback. Just for you to notice, the guidelines are totally editable, but you have to be a member.
  - JeremyMorgan 13y ago
    Yeah, you definitely don't want it wide open. Now that I got to the signup page I see you have github + twitter + facebook for signup options so it appears I was preaching to the choir :) I'll check it out!
- derefr 13y ago
  Having a wiki-page regarding a matter of contentious opinion just results in edit wars, because at any time only one point-of-view can be presented as the "accepted" one. Whereas, on a Q&A-type site, you can have "idiomatic way to do X in Y" as the question, each person's point-of-view as a possible answer, and then the community can just vote the most popularly-agreed answer to the top, instead of editing a single answer back-and-forth.
manishsharan 13y ago
Stackoverflow is mostly kind to newbie questions; Serverfault however however seems to be moderated by a bunch of stuck up assholes. I had a newbie question when I was setting up some dedicated servers for the first time: my newbie question, about networking/nas etc, got shutdown with bunch of snarky comment on the line of "hire a trained experienced networking guru". I have never gone back since then.
- morbius 13y ago
  Correlation != causation. I've seen many noob questions on StackOverflow that go either way, and many on SF that also do the same. Every moderator is different -- there are plenty of overzealous ones on StackOverflow and plenty on ServerFault. Same goes for any StackExchange site, really.
- danbruc 13y ago
  I obviously have no clue what your question was but I can understand this attitude to some degree. Let me explain. I contributed a lot to StackOverflow in the early years. Most of the questions were interesting and not answered before. I almost stopped contributing in recent years because now there are so many trivial questions and questions that have been answered before. I see no value in explaining how to sort a list of peaches when there is already a question answering how to sort apples and one how to sort oranges. And I never understood StackOverflow as having the goal to teach programming but to help solving non-trivial problems. Now there seems to be a ton of question like how do I open a file in Python. More and more people seem to just ask everything on StackOverflow instead of reading a manual, a book, a tutorial or at least look if there is already an answer that can be adapted to their problem. I can not quantify this, it is only my personal understanding of what questions should be on StackOverflow and what should better be looked up elsewhere, but I can to some extend understand that people get annoyed be some questions.
  - rpedela 13y ago
    I personally like the "how to open file" questions. Even though I have been developing software for ~15 years, I often forget basic file I/O syntax when I need to switch languages which is rather common lately. I remember how file I/O works, how to make it efficient, etc. But the syntax? Yeah I forget that, and I find StackOverflow to be a great reference manual. Often the official manuals are verbose which isn't what I want in this case. I just want a quick example to remind myself of the syntax.
VoiceOfWisdom 13y ago
Could you wrap the 'logo-pro' img tag in an anchor instead of using js to redirect? Using js to redirect breaks ctrl clicking to open in a new tab, and keeps me from staying on your cool blog post.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Oh! Yes, no problem! Thank you for the advice, I will fix it.
- stronglikedan 13y ago
  You could submit that as a guideline.
  - diegoloop 13y ago
    Great idea!
scarecrowbob 13y ago
Hey, I totally failed your user registration captcha about 5 times in a row. I've never had that problem in all the time I've been on the web, but it has prevented me from using your service.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  I had to use CAPTCHA because I hate signups, where you have to write your email, and then they send you a link and that stuff. Please try again!
VikingCoder 13y ago
StackOverflow totally missed the boat, and I think your idea isn't much better (because coding standards is only ONE of the many opinion-based areas that we're all interested in). StackOverflow could totally have had "poll your peers" questions, in addition to the fact-based Q&A that the moderators there prefer. They could have politely shuffled opinion-based questions to another area, maybe even another StackExchange site. In improv, you're always supposed to find creative ways to say "YES!" Instead, the Stack Overflow response to enormously popular opinion surveys was, "You're not welcome here!"
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > In improv, you're always supposed to find creative ways to say "YES!" StackOverflow isn't improv theater.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    Why do you always find a way to say "YES!" in improv? Because it's engaging. It allows everyone to create new realities, and for other people to explore use-cases that the original creator never thought of. I believe that kind of thinking belongs on sites like StackOverflow.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      I believe, on the other hand, that that kind of thinking defines a very different kind of site than StackOverflow. It might be a different kind of site that you would prefer to StackOverflow, but that's a different question.
      - VikingCoder 13y ago
        Right, I'm not saying the guys who run StackOverflow need to allow me and my opinion surveys on StackOverlfow... But the StackExchange platform allowed them to create Programmers.StackExchange.com, where opinion polls are welcome. EDIT: slightly more welcome, sometimes, maybe. If they had figured that out sooner, and had migrated questions from StackOverflow, they could have done a much better job at engaging users. Saying "your question is closed as off-topic" is totally different from "your question has been migrated". I commend them for the second, and I condemn them for the first.
iterationx 13y ago
That's why we need StackOverflowOverflow
- luch 13y ago
  That what "Not Constructive" is about : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876. It seems they finally have a website !
aaimnr 13y ago
Can't believe no one mentioned http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ This official stackexchange site complements stackoverflow for the exact reasons mentioned by OP - it's concerned with more open-ended questions related to high level programming concepts. Here's the rationale behind it in Jeff Atwood words (stackoverflow co-creator): http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmer...
- tricolon 13y ago
  I was aware of programmers.stackexchange but wasn't sure of the difference until now. Instead of closing questions on Stack Overflow with messages such as "This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site", it would be a lot more helpful to point people to a better home for such questions, such as programmers.stackexchange.
- MaxGabriel 13y ago
  My experience is that, in practice, open-ended questions on programmers.stackexchange are closed too, e.g. this post of mine http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/133506/when-stuck-how-quickly-should-one-resort-to-stack-overflow http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/133506/when-s...
- collyw 13y ago
  I have had just as much stuff pedantically closed on programmers.stackexchange.
- ProAm 13y ago
  Programmers.stackexchange is a horrible experience. Over moderated to a fault and snarky filled. It's almost impossible to tell what the site is supposed to be used for. You'll have a better chance asking a question on Reddit than in Programmers.SE
nraynaud 13y ago
It just makes me realize how removed I am from the community, I disagree, with almost everything I see.
eykanal 13y ago
I'm not seeing this as an improvement. I'm familiar with PHP coding, and over the past few years the community has come up with a set of standards in the form of the PSR documents (http://www.php-fig.org/psr/ http://www.php-fig.org/psr/). This site doesn't many any allowance for pre-existing standards. It seems that the idea behind this site is "let's make some software to enable the crowd-sourcing of the standardization process". That may be a good idea, but (1) I'm not sure that this is needed, and (2) I'm not sure who the target audience is.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Hi eykanal! The target audience of this site are people just like you. On Coding Style Guide (CSG) you can help other developers (maybe new in PHP) with your expertise. So maybe the next time you have to work on a new project with a new team with members from different backgrounds, you can just go to CSG and take what is useful for your project. That's my vision of CSG. It's just a collection of good quality content. One knows it is good quality, because the best ones have the best rating.
cstefanovici 13y ago
This website is brilliant. I am looking forward to contributing to Coding Style Guide.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Thank you! I see you there!
EpicEng 13y ago
> "However, I noticed that there is not such a website, with a reasonable freedom (very different than google-styleguide), where everyone can add own guidelines, and it's also available for all programming languages out there... And believe me there are tons of developers asking for guidelines all the time. XKCD with Donald Knuth explain the task better:" I guess the author never ran across http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ http://codereview.stackexchange.com/
mparlane 13y ago
You really should be using ++i out of habit :)
- diegoloop 13y ago
  :)
Too 13y ago
If the rules could be exported to some static code checker / linter it would be great. Also the other way around would be good, ie referring someone's opinion in a standardized way to some rule in an existing style guideline. As someone else pointed out, most of the JavaScript guidelines are just copies from JsLint, their guidelines might contain more justification so an external reference would be nice. Now URLs in the comments aren't even clickable.
NAFV_P 13y ago
You know that really annoying problem where you can't think of a certain term, but doing a web search is fairly useless because you don't know what to look for (chicken and egg ?)... Googled "binary search find nth node" ... first three results are from SO, third one down [0], go down the page to find the term that I was looking for: "order statistics tree" [1]. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2329171/find-kth-smallest-element-in-a-binary-search-tree-in-optimum-way http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2329171/find-kth-smallest... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic_tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic_tree

83 points by diegoloop 13y ago

But you could reduce the JavaScript style guide entries to just "Use JSLint and do what it says". Perhaps the others are more helpful or perhaps (more likely) other languages do not have Lint. I am sure there is more to it but does not require lengthier posts - perhaps essays?

diegoloop 13y ago
This is just an alternative for guidelines! It's like asking the developers what they really use in their daily code. ... I implemented so, that the title and the language are required, the description is not, so you can just have. Use PascalCase for methods. and added the C# tag, for example
- bdfh42 13y ago
  Ok - but do you think that (continuing the example) the JavaScript entries do add up to something more than just what Lint says to do? Cos I can see it. I do think there are benefits in more assistance for people with style and structure - I was just wondering if a longer format would suite the need better.
  - diegoloop 13y ago
    I think there is no right or wrong in writing code, it's a matter of style, so at CSG you have different alternatives and you can just pick what you think is most convenient for your code! I dont understand what you mean by "if a longer format would suite the need better"
    - bdfh42 13y ago
      Surely "style" is more than "use === not ==". That's a tip - and perhaps not worth a lot as a tip if there is not a full explanation to back it up. "Why not?" and "What's wrong with that?" Does not style devolve from structure? Hmn - maybe Structure devolves from Style. Tricky - thus I think that without a "long form" explanation of what you are trying to achieve and thus how each "tip" fits into the objectives then the contribution is lessened. The original objective was to write "better" programs in a new language - a very worthy objective but without analyzing what "better" means and how any component contributes to "better" then I am not clear how you have advanced things. I laud your objectives - and was just wondering about (grin) the style.

kozhevnikov 13y ago

Isn't that what codereview.stackexchange.com is for?

diegoloop 13y ago
Not at all, Coding Style Guide is not a Q&A site. This is more of opinion. I just focused in guidelines (best/bad practices, conventions, standards, and so on...) The idea is to make the code universally readable for anyone!

JeremyMorgan 13y ago

Great idea, but in order to succeed you need to make the guidelines editable like a wiki, and make the accounts something someone already has. For example, - https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide - https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards These are editable by anyone and people already on GitHub so it makes it easy. I don't want to rain on your parade, I think the site is a great idea, just expressing what I think it would need to succeed. I was trying to go to about or sign up and it timed out, I'll be back later to check it out.

diegoloop 13y ago
Oh yes, please! It looks like Amazon is having troubles to handle too many requests. Thank you very much for your feedback. Just for you to notice, the guidelines are totally editable, but you have to be a member.
- JeremyMorgan 13y ago
  Yeah, you definitely don't want it wide open. Now that I got to the signup page I see you have github + twitter + facebook for signup options so it appears I was preaching to the choir :) I'll check it out!
derefr 13y ago
Having a wiki-page regarding a matter of contentious opinion just results in edit wars, because at any time only one point-of-view can be presented as the "accepted" one. Whereas, on a Q&A-type site, you can have "idiomatic way to do X in Y" as the question, each person's point-of-view as a possible answer, and then the community can just vote the most popularly-agreed answer to the top, instead of editing a single answer back-and-forth.

manishsharan 13y ago

Stackoverflow is mostly kind to newbie questions; Serverfault however however seems to be moderated by a bunch of stuck up assholes. I had a newbie question when I was setting up some dedicated servers for the first time: my newbie question, about networking/nas etc, got shutdown with bunch of snarky comment on the line of "hire a trained experienced networking guru". I have never gone back since then.

morbius 13y ago
Correlation != causation. I've seen many noob questions on StackOverflow that go either way, and many on SF that also do the same. Every moderator is different -- there are plenty of overzealous ones on StackOverflow and plenty on ServerFault. Same goes for any StackExchange site, really.
danbruc 13y ago
I obviously have no clue what your question was but I can understand this attitude to some degree. Let me explain. I contributed a lot to StackOverflow in the early years. Most of the questions were interesting and not answered before. I almost stopped contributing in recent years because now there are so many trivial questions and questions that have been answered before. I see no value in explaining how to sort a list of peaches when there is already a question answering how to sort apples and one how to sort oranges. And I never understood StackOverflow as having the goal to teach programming but to help solving non-trivial problems. Now there seems to be a ton of question like how do I open a file in Python. More and more people seem to just ask everything on StackOverflow instead of reading a manual, a book, a tutorial or at least look if there is already an answer that can be adapted to their problem. I can not quantify this, it is only my personal understanding of what questions should be on StackOverflow and what should better be looked up elsewhere, but I can to some extend understand that people get annoyed be some questions.
- rpedela 13y ago
  I personally like the "how to open file" questions. Even though I have been developing software for ~15 years, I often forget basic file I/O syntax when I need to switch languages which is rather common lately. I remember how file I/O works, how to make it efficient, etc. But the syntax? Yeah I forget that, and I find StackOverflow to be a great reference manual. Often the official manuals are verbose which isn't what I want in this case. I just want a quick example to remind myself of the syntax.

VoiceOfWisdom 13y ago

Could you wrap the 'logo-pro' img tag in an anchor instead of using js to redirect? Using js to redirect breaks ctrl clicking to open in a new tab, and keeps me from staying on your cool blog post.

diegoloop 13y ago
Oh! Yes, no problem! Thank you for the advice, I will fix it.
stronglikedan 13y ago
You could submit that as a guideline.
- diegoloop 13y ago
  Great idea!

scarecrowbob 13y ago

Hey, I totally failed your user registration captcha about 5 times in a row. I've never had that problem in all the time I've been on the web, but it has prevented me from using your service.

diegoloop 13y ago
I had to use CAPTCHA because I hate signups, where you have to write your email, and then they send you a link and that stuff. Please try again!

VikingCoder 13y ago

StackOverflow totally missed the boat, and I think your idea isn't much better (because coding standards is only ONE of the many opinion-based areas that we're all interested in). StackOverflow could totally have had "poll your peers" questions, in addition to the fact-based Q&A that the moderators there prefer. They could have politely shuffled opinion-based questions to another area, maybe even another StackExchange site. In improv, you're always supposed to find creative ways to say "YES!" Instead, the Stack Overflow response to enormously popular opinion surveys was, "You're not welcome here!"

dragonwriter 13y ago
> In improv, you're always supposed to find creative ways to say "YES!" StackOverflow isn't improv theater.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  Why do you always find a way to say "YES!" in improv? Because it's engaging. It allows everyone to create new realities, and for other people to explore use-cases that the original creator never thought of. I believe that kind of thinking belongs on sites like StackOverflow.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    I believe, on the other hand, that that kind of thinking defines a very different kind of site than StackOverflow. It might be a different kind of site that you would prefer to StackOverflow, but that's a different question.
    - VikingCoder 13y ago
      Right, I'm not saying the guys who run StackOverflow need to allow me and my opinion surveys on StackOverlfow... But the StackExchange platform allowed them to create Programmers.StackExchange.com, where opinion polls are welcome. EDIT: slightly more welcome, sometimes, maybe. If they had figured that out sooner, and had migrated questions from StackOverflow, they could have done a much better job at engaging users. Saying "your question is closed as off-topic" is totally different from "your question has been migrated". I commend them for the second, and I condemn them for the first.

iterationx 13y ago

That's why we need StackOverflowOverflow

luch 13y ago
That what "Not Constructive" is about : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876. It seems they finally have a website !

aaimnr 13y ago

Can't believe no one mentioned http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ This official stackexchange site complements stackoverflow for the exact reasons mentioned by OP - it's concerned with more open-ended questions related to high level programming concepts. Here's the rationale behind it in Jeff Atwood words (stackoverflow co-creator): http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmer...

tricolon 13y ago
I was aware of programmers.stackexchange but wasn't sure of the difference until now. Instead of closing questions on Stack Overflow with messages such as "This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site", it would be a lot more helpful to point people to a better home for such questions, such as programmers.stackexchange.
MaxGabriel 13y ago
My experience is that, in practice, open-ended questions on programmers.stackexchange are closed too, e.g. this post of mine http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/133506/when-stuck-how-quickly-should-one-resort-to-stack-overflow http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/133506/when-s...
collyw 13y ago
I have had just as much stuff pedantically closed on programmers.stackexchange.
ProAm 13y ago
Programmers.stackexchange is a horrible experience. Over moderated to a fault and snarky filled. It's almost impossible to tell what the site is supposed to be used for. You'll have a better chance asking a question on Reddit than in Programmers.SE

nraynaud 13y ago

It just makes me realize how removed I am from the community, I disagree, with almost everything I see.

eykanal 13y ago

I'm not seeing this as an improvement. I'm familiar with PHP coding, and over the past few years the community has come up with a set of standards in the form of the PSR documents (http://www.php-fig.org/psr/ http://www.php-fig.org/psr/). This site doesn't many any allowance for pre-existing standards. It seems that the idea behind this site is "let's make some software to enable the crowd-sourcing of the standardization process". That may be a good idea, but (1) I'm not sure that this is needed, and (2) I'm not sure who the target audience is.

diegoloop 13y ago
Hi eykanal! The target audience of this site are people just like you. On Coding Style Guide (CSG) you can help other developers (maybe new in PHP) with your expertise. So maybe the next time you have to work on a new project with a new team with members from different backgrounds, you can just go to CSG and take what is useful for your project. That's my vision of CSG. It's just a collection of good quality content. One knows it is good quality, because the best ones have the best rating.

cstefanovici 13y ago

This website is brilliant. I am looking forward to contributing to Coding Style Guide.

diegoloop 13y ago
Thank you! I see you there!

EpicEng 13y ago

> "However, I noticed that there is not such a website, with a reasonable freedom (very different than google-styleguide), where everyone can add own guidelines, and it's also available for all programming languages out there... And believe me there are tons of developers asking for guidelines all the time. XKCD with Donald Knuth explain the task better:" I guess the author never ran across http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ http://codereview.stackexchange.com/

mparlane 13y ago

You really should be using ++i out of habit :)

diegoloop 13y ago
:)

Too 13y ago

If the rules could be exported to some static code checker / linter it would be great. Also the other way around would be good, ie referring someone's opinion in a standardized way to some rule in an existing style guideline. As someone else pointed out, most of the JavaScript guidelines are just copies from JsLint, their guidelines might contain more justification so an external reference would be nice. Now URLs in the comments aren't even clickable.

NAFV_P 13y ago

You know that really annoying problem where you can't think of a certain term, but doing a web search is fairly useless because you don't know what to look for (chicken and egg ?)... Googled "binary search find nth node" ... first three results are from SO, third one down [0], go down the page to find the term that I was looking for: "order statistics tree" [1]. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2329171/find-kth-smallest-element-in-a-binary-search-tree-in-optimum-way http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2329171/find-kth-smallest... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic_tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic_tree