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Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#12There are communities just like what you describe on Gitter in the rooms for particular programming languages
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#13On the contrary, there are lots of different programming communities. They represent different areas of interest, levels of knowledge, experience.
I cannot see how we could have a "single community" that is equally relevant to CS researchers and newbie programmers and all the other variations in between.
To take your example of "discussing programming", Lambda the Ultimate comes to mind. But even there how could reconcile the "conversations" of JavaScript hackers and Haskell gurus?
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#14People use the word community in such false ways. I've heard phrases like "the pancake eating community" and so on. People who eat pancakes aren't a community. Your community consists of the people who will let you stay at their house if yours floods. Or the people who will come and get you if your car breaks down. That's a community.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#15I see programmers discussing all over, for example in Github Issues, or Stackoverflow. Always topic based discussions, obviously. They lack the social interaction and freedom to think more broadly about programming and solutions, though. Is that what you are talking about? Edit: grammar
Github is pretty diffuse to count much as a community, though there are aspects of community about it.
Stackoverflow and kin are very focused on specific questions and are elitist. I've participated for years and find that I cannot add my comments because I don't have sufficient points. And DO NOT post a stupid question or someone will suggest you delete it. (I'm of the opinion that there are no stupid questions but I do see the occasional stupid answer.)
The communities I see are a bit more general than programming. A good example is the Raspberry Pi community. Many of their discussions involve programming but more generally are "how do I do XXX." That community is also fostered by the folks who bring us the RPi.
Some of the more recent languages like Rust and Go seem to be fostering too.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#16If you can't find a service that provides what you are referring to, build something new. Create a 4chan for programming or something terrible and work really hard on it til you are proud of it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#17Stackoverflow? It's a real place to discuss programming. Discussions spans across years, and not limited to solving a particular technical problem, there are questions about general concept clarifications. Plus there are also github repos where relevant code is discussed directly.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#18> To me, the most puzzling thing about programming is that there is no real place to actually discuss programming.
There totally are. Forums, chatrooms, mailing lists - they tend to be more niche than simply "programming", because that's simply such a huge topic... you can find better, if more niche, common ground. You don't have "the drinking" community - you have coffee lovers, the wine testers, microbrewers, etc.
I spent long enough on gamedev.net and it's associated chat channels (first IRC, now Discord too) for my relationships with people online to bleed out into the real world. It taught me a ton about programming. It got me my first industry job offer, from someone who I helped teach. In passing, I've seen various FOSS communities, programming languages, etc. - often focused strictly on shop talk, but not always.
There's a lot of pseudonymity to be sure, and you'll get pushback if the first thing out of your mouth is "hey check out my game/project/community, email me because I'm not sticking around long enough to hear any feedback here" - which happens surprisingly often - but there's plenty people can share relating to their projects, the tech they're using, or having trouble with, or finding new and interesting ways to (ab)use - even from the get go, that can be well received.
It's the difference between finding a topic of shared interest to discuss, vs broadcasting a topic of just your interest to talk at people with. The latter isn't a discussion.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#19There is. IRC and it has been around for decades. Freenet.
I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small and hard-to-discover. There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into "please do my homework." At least, in my experience. I could be wrong, though.
> I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small and hard-to-discover.
Size varies. I'm idling in Mozilla's #rust and that has 1390 people in it alone. And small communities are still communities, I'd argue as well!
> There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into "please do my homework." At least, in my experience.
There will always be (attempted) freeloaders in any community. How they're handled varies - I've been in several with explicit no-homework policies, where the community will give you grief if you didn't even try to google, strongly steering people towards developing their ability to help themselves rather than relying on handouts. "Teach a man to fish" etc.
Which isn't to say people won't still try, but it can be managed and policed.
Even there, people will generally help out when someone encounters a totally strange/niche/not easily understood or explained edge case, if only to better understand it for themselves, or to spend a minute to save another person hours. But that's a win/win as far as I'm concerned - not much of a community IMO if you're not willing to do that!
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?
#20People use the word community in such false ways. I've heard phrases like "the pancake eating community" and so on. People who eat pancakes aren't a community. Your community consists of the people who will let you stay at their house if yours floods. Or the people who will come and get you if your car breaks down. That's a community.
Those are called friends.