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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

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

#191

Post by airstrike »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #55
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.

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…

My first programming experience was with mIRC scripting and it was ridiculously convenient to have everything in a nicely written a local, offline .hlp file

https://www.mirc.com/help/html/index.html?mirc_scripts.html

I remember spending the afternoon tinkering with it until late at night when dial-up "logic" meant I could finally go online without it costing an arm and a leg

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

#192

Post by closeparen »

MattGaiser wrote: post #190
dkersten wrote: post #110

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 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.

The quality of autocomplete that's possible has a lot to do with the type system.

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

#193

Post by Xavdidtheshadow »

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Nice! I thought it was a cute idea and I like little useless hardware.

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

#194

Post by reader_mode »

dkersten wrote: post #110

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 th…

>I'm trying to think what's changed

SO used to have really god content for really some fundamental questions which gave it some credibility. As it accumulates more content the quality is really going down - I actively avoid SO unless I can't find any other source.

GitHub - literally every problem I have nowdays I spend searching through GH issues, reading through the code upstream and reporting back. For example I was working with .NET framework for a while (~5-6 years back now) and when dealing with closed source frameworks SO was a replacement for support channels. Now even as I'm coming back to a .NET core project - everything is OSS and on GitHub.

Docs also got better, MDN is now defunded by mozilla but where I had to do a SO search for random JS behavior I can now look up decent references on MDN. I think Google got better at indexing documentation as well.

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

#195

Post by kstenerud »

dkersten wrote: post #110

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 th…

I do: Yesterday when I was looking up how to declare and use arrays in bash for the 1000th time. Bash is probably the #1 reason I end up there through a search.

After 25 years professional experience (plus 12 years before that), there are a number of reasons why I search for "how to do X in Y" online at least once a week:

- The language is poorly designed and has a lot of unintuitive, unorthogonal, difficult-to-remember parts or nasty footguns, but people continue using this beast-that-cannot-be-slain out of industry inertia (like Bash or CMake).

- The language is in a constant state of flux, adding new features and best practices / idiomatic things, and the cruft-that-must-not-be-used buildup is so insane that even a few years out of the loop makes you feel like a complete beginner (like C++ or Python or JS).

- The language is complicated enough that unless it's your day job you won't remember how to do basic things after a few months away (like Rust or Haskell or Gradle).

- It's been 10 years since you touched it and how the hell do you concatenate a string again???

I think the only languages I can just slide right back into are Java, C#, LUA, and Go (and C, but probably only because I used it daily for decades).

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

#196

Post by user1234567890 »

reader_mode wrote: post #194
dkersten wrote: post #110

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 th…

>I'm trying to think what's changed SO used to have really god content for really some fundamental questions which gave it some credibility. As it accumulates more content the quality is really going down - I actively avoid SO unless I can't find any other source. GitHub - literally every problem I have nowdays I spend searching through GH issues, reading through the code upstream and reporting back. For example I wa…

> I think Google got better at indexing documentation as well

I think this is it. I also thing documentation in general has gotten a lot better at answering questions rather than being just an autogen api doc site.

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

#197

Post by dkersten »

MattGaiser wrote: post #190
dkersten wrote: post #110

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 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.

I don’t rely on autocomplete quite as much as some people, although it for sure helps.

I do think that a big part is that the two things I spend most of my programming time on, one Clojure project and one C++ project, I’m just pretty familiar with at this stage. I’ve been using Clojure for ten years and the language hasn’t changed all that much, so I don’t need to look things up often (besides the occasional reference material on clojuredocs). For libraries, I check their readme’s and just read the code. I’ve actually never really used SO for clojure, now that I think about it. The Clojure project I’m working on is also a little bit niche, so I don’t tend to find anything useful on SO for it.

For C++, I keep cppreference at hand and only really use SO when I’m trying to figure out weird things, or newer features I’ve not yet used much. Again, for the libraries I use, it’s a mixture of documentation and reading headers and it’s rare that SO helps there.

In my previous job, I was mainly working with AWS services, terraform and some python (using boto) and, again, I had everything I needed from their documentation. Before that, it was Java with some Clojure, but again, the challenging part was the domain, which was nothing that SO could have helped with. Everything else, we had under control.

Maybe I got better at reading documentation?

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

#198

Post by dkersten »

dan-robertson wrote: post #136
dkersten wrote: post #110

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 th…

I also use stack overflow very little but I think it’s much more easily explained by my personal habits than changes on the site. When I used stack overflow more, I was doing stuff with web technologies and Unix command line tools. These days I’m much more experienced with Unix tools; I use more specialised tools that aren’t mentioned on SO, use a programming language which isn’t often mentioned on SO, and a large ar…

That does sound a bit like me too. I use tools that I’m e it her familiar with enough not to need SO, or that are too specialised or niche for SO to be useful. I have no problem reading documentation or just diving into the code if all else fails.

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

#199

Post by dkersten »

troutwine wrote: post #150
Silhouette wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I actually deleted my account some time ago via GDPR request. So I haven’t contributed in a long time (but wasn’t a heavy user anyway). But I have noticed a major decline in my using it at all, even for just reading answers. Yes, I did look up that C++ thing a few days ago, and ended up finding the answer on SO, but before that, I have no idea when I used it last. Could be months.
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