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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

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101–110 of 243 posts

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#101

Post by milkytron »

agallant wrote: post #88
ASalazarMX wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that most manuals have evolved to web pages that you can't download as PDFs or eBooks. Now you usually have to go online to find that keyword, and as you're online already, might as well google for the whole answer. One of the most productive times in my career was programming for the IBM i in the 90s. There were manuals online, but you could also download indexed PDFs versions. IBM did a superb job with…

You may be interested in https://devdocs.io (offline-friendly documentation tool). And if you prefer a straight up desktop app - https://zealdocs.org

I also really enjoyed Dash when it was free to use: https://kapeli.com/dash

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#102

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

PhillyG wrote: post #100
flimflamm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a terrific joke!

I'm enjoying the license it uses: "This module is licensed under whatever license you want it to be as long as the license is compatible with the fact that I blatantly copied multiple lines of code from the Python standard library"

Thanks for sharing. This made my afternoon :)

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#104

Post by klmadfejno »

henrikeh wrote: post #58
arduinomancer wrote: post #29

IMO its not even that we're copying people's logic, its just that stack overflow acts as a weird sort of crowd-sourced centralized documentation for programming languages. For example if I forget the name of a function for something in a particular language I don't even go to the docs, I just google something like "python reverse list" and click the first SO link.

Is it just me or is this also a symptom of Python's documentation being really strange to navigate and generally having a massive impedance mismatch with Google? When I search on Google for "python reverse list", not a single link is to the official Python documentation. Not even if I search for "python reverse" does the documentation page show up. Searching for "python reverse documentation" leads to the second link…

> When I search on Google for "python reverse list", not a single link is to the official Python documentation. Not even if I search for "python reverse" does the documentation page show up. Searching for "python reverse documentation" leads to the second link to the Build-in Functions page (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html), which is what I "need".

But what you want is probably ls[::-1]

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#105

Post by ASalazarMX »

agallant wrote: post #88
ASalazarMX wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that most manuals have evolved to web pages that you can't download as PDFs or eBooks. Now you usually have to go online to find that keyword, and as you're online already, might as well google for the whole answer. One of the most productive times in my career was programming for the IBM i in the 90s. There were manuals online, but you could also download indexed PDFs versions. IBM did a superb job with…

You may be interested in https://devdocs.io (offline-friendly documentation tool). And if you prefer a straight up desktop app - https://zealdocs.org

Thank you. I've used it, although it adds a lot of complexity for the same features than a folder full of manuals would give.

I'm probably too set in my ways, but I prefer references that are always available offline. Devdocs.io once in a blue moon would forget about my choices, and I would hate to redownload them.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#106

Post by jabo »

milkytron wrote: post #101
agallant wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be interested in https://devdocs.io (offline-friendly documentation tool). And if you prefer a straight up desktop app - https://zealdocs.org

I also really enjoyed Dash when it was free to use: https://kapeli.com/dash

Why not pay for it or get your employer to pay for it, especially if you enjoyed it?

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#107

Post by ghaff »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #87
ralusek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting that you say that because I actually have the opposite reaction. When I go to look for documentation and find that it's a PDF, I want to die.

PDFs are horrible as eBooks, but in a manual I prefer the fidelity of a PDF than the reflowing of an ePUB, or the fickleness, slowness, and potential unavailability of a web page. A well structured and correctly indexed PDF is a godsend, because you just open the table of contents, quickly locate what you're looking for, click and there is your answer. As I said, IBM excels at writing documentation. Every language ha…

I think it depends. For something well-structured like a cookbook I'd prefer PDF in most cases. But it really varies. For example I find most guidebooks do a decent job of Kindle these days and have actually switched over to a significant degree because it's really useful to have everything on my phone.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#108

Post by ketzo »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #97
metalforever wrote: post #11

This is an unpopular opinion but I think the answer to this may depend on the age of the engineer. For example, I learned programming before stack overflow. I have most of the standard library syntax in my head and mostly look at spec documents. Once in a great while I will go on stack overflow if I can’t debug a problem but I don’t post on there . In the same way, I suspect some engineers like using video to learn t…

Sometimes you want a discussion of the pros and cons of the various ways to tackle a problem, in order to find the best approach for your application. This kind of information is almost never in standard documentation.

Yep. There's nothing quite like the experience of going on Stack Overflow for a particular problem, and the "best answer" is almost what you need...

but you scroll down, and there's a different version that's exactly what you need! except it's for an older version of the library...

but there's a comment on that answer, from two years later, with a quick note on "if you're at version 7+, just do Y instead of X."

Absolutely wonderful.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#110

Post by dkersten »

Interestingly, I don't remember when the last time I did so was. I seem to be relying on SO less and less. I do sometimes use it as a quick reference, usually because its one of the first results on search engines, but its typically just a quick "ah, that's the function for that" or "ah, that's how you do X" rather than actually copying code.

I'm trying to think what's changed, I guess I've just been writing stuff that either I'm super comfortable with or is niche enough that there's not that much on SO that's helpful. Looking in my browser history, the last thing I looked for that I got an answer on SO is what's the differences between C++'s std::scoped_lock and std::unique_lock, which was a few days ago. I still use SO, just not as frequently as a few years ago.

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