It would be interesting to see cases where the most upvoted answer isn't actually the most copied answer. Stackoverflow could potentially rank highly copied answers higher.
How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
181–190 of 243 posts
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#182Q: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
A: Very rarely. And when I do, it really depends on the language.
If you find a solution for Clojure, chances are it's pretty high quality. The fact that the language has been essentially stable for 10 years helps. The language culture around minimizing complexity and a strong preference for pure functions also doesn't hurt.
For other more "churny" & mutable languages you gotta be careful. It could be a good solution, or it could be old, unwieldy or excessively complex.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#183Interestingly, 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 stopped relying SO and started relying heavily on https://grep.app and Github search. Most of the time the code actually works and there's good references on how to structure things.
If you like grep, you'll probably really like Sourcegraph, which I believe has most of GitHub indexed and supports some useful operators: https://sourcegraph.com/search
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#184IMO 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.
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…
I once downloaded Python docs as an iPad app and a small Python IDE - I was working on a cruise ship and so offline documentation really helped.
It taught me to get better at reading the Python docs, but more importantly to cope better without being able to just search every issue I was having online.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#185After 10 years of coding I visit stack overflow less and less. In fact when I first started there was no stack overflow, we had to rely on Google.
I find it useful to educate other engineers on best practices. There are good posts on MVC, SOLID, TL;DRs of popular books like working effectively with legacy code etc.
I find it useful to see how different people have approached the same problem. I'll generally look at multiple questions and answers before deciding on my own approach (not necessarily the ones I saw on SO).
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#186IMO 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…
> Is it just me
no. I stored the entire python document set locally, yet I still search online for functions.
stuff like: is it str.beginswith() or str.startswith()?
Blast, how do I convert to/from unicode again???
I think what we need is some sort of mashup of rosetta code and the docs and an index.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#187All the time, man. I cargo cult the fuck out of the following:
# https://stackoverflow.com/a/246128
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )"Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#188Interestingly, 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/relevan…
There are weird people on SO who are both trolls and knowledgeable. There is one person who edits EVERY SINGLE question regarding a certain programming language. Then attempts to close every question as "already asked", even where it is somewhat questionable whether it had been asked already or not. He knows his stuff really well though so he ends up not getting banned.
I do not get it.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This rings very true to me. The GP's comment made me consider that I very rarely go to Stackoverflow anymore, no longer contribute and what stuff I do find there useful is from well before the cultur…
It's a wasteland now. Legitimate, perfectly answerable questions get hostile comments and close votes. The other sites in the Stackexchange network aren't nearly as bad, fortunately. English Language Learners and Math/MathOverflow are very positive places. Software Engineering is pretty good, too.
There's also a lot of people karma farming (for employment reasons?). A couple of years ago I was searching for something and the same question was asked by someone else on SO and this came up repeatedly while I was looking, but after 4 years there was no answer so it was a very low quality result. A couple of days later I did find/discover an answer so I went back to SO and added my reply, miraculously after 4 years someone else added an answer about 12 minutes later, it was the same answer as mine with a little more formatting and marked themselves as correct.
So after that experience would I go to the effort of contributing back again? Maybe in this case, because the answer was shorter than this post, but the equation might change if it required more effort.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#190Interestingly, 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…
Sure it wasn’t just autocomplete? Autocomplete eliminates half my reasons to visit SO.
Previously you had to know the function you wanted to call. Now you can just scroll through the functions from typing the dot.