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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
111–120 of 243 posts
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#112IMO 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.
Just in case this idea needed any more validation, a few years ago Stackoverflow themselves launched a 'Stackoverflow for Documentation' product [0], and eventually shut it down because, as was probably obvious to many going in and certainly in retrospect, this product was of course.. just Stackoverflow.
[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#113I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
What's worse is when you find your own answer and don't even remember writing it!
Worse still is finding entire old projects with your name on them and not remembering them at all.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#114Earlier 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…
for this specific use case a single html file that you open in the browser might be the best option (at least php offer that option and I appreciated it).
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#115IMO 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.
I do this for sometimes and get... myself in 2013 answering somebody
Also been there, however mine was me answering my own question. Several years later I helped myself out again with it.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#116I've found that the amount I use stackoverflow is inversely proportional to the quality of the documentation and the strength of the type-system of the language I'm using.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#117IMO 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…
It’s not just you. Python seems to suffer from Python-specific ”tutorial sites” being SEO’d above Python’s official docs. I don’t know what it is about the Python documentation that lowers its rank on Google search results. In general, not a big fan of Python docs.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#118One of the interview questions I ask is, "if you run in a problem you can't solve, where do you go online to find answers?" Anyone that doesn't answer Stack Overflow is - in my opinion - either lying or very, very new to the industry. (This is for .Net/C# jobs so maybe it's different for other languages.)
I assume this is for more junior roles?
It's been a long time since I've needed to use SO for something in my day job. I mostly end up on the github/microsoft issues sites scrolling down to see whether the compiler/library bug I just reproduced has been fixed yet or at least has a workaround...
I think a better question would be "How do you go about finding a solution to a roadblock you've encountered while writing code?", that will test for people who go straight to colleagues for each little issue instead of spending 10 minutes looking up a solution themselves. It also gives you an idea of their problem solving process.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#119I've found that the amount I use stackoverflow is inversely proportional to the quality of the documentation and the strength of the type-system of the language I'm using.
Definitely. Looking at my browser history for stackoverflow + PHP, it seems to be things to do with PHP, such as how to prevent a referrer from being sent when users click a link on my website. That's of course not actually part of the PHP language, so it would seem like I'm rarely looking up how to use PHP APIs on stackoverflow. I've always found PHP docs to be the best of any language that I've used.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#120Interestingly, 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 th…
I'm trying to think what's changed
Among other possibilities:
SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors.
SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. In that respect, it has become its own worst enemy, with old answers about obsolete versions and practices often ranking highly in search results.
The first of those problems then exacerbates the second, because the same cultural issues get in the way of both updating answers to old questions and asking new questions that might be superficially similar to ones that already exist but actually need a different answer.
Meanwhile, in many areas of programming, documentation from other sources has become both better in quality and more readily located thanks to other well-known sites and high search engine rankings. Relatively speaking, SO simply isn't as useful if there is already primary documentation that answers questions correctly and comprehensively.
And finally, you personally may have grown as a developer over time, becoming both more capable of solving problems for yourself and more familiar with whatever tools you use regularly, so you might not need external help so often.
FWIW, I'm also in the "rarely visit SO any more" camp. I think I have a kind of banner blindness for SO hits on search results pages now, perhaps because I'm assuming that following a SO link is unlikely to provide a useful answer so I almost always check other plausible sources first. On those occasions when I do get as far as visiting SO, I'm usually reminded of why I tend to work this way now.