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Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

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Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#121

Post by jiggy2011 »

startuup wrote: post #74
jc4p wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily a lot of us are on the same page as you :) One of the things I consider a main detriment of our current product is that for the vast majority of users it's built to be transactional. Search, land on SO, read, go back to work. On our currently in development mobile apps we're trying out something different, for the first time at scale we're pushing content to users rather than having them search for it as the…

Thats a great start but there are other ideas too. Why isn't SE as useful for people in other professions, like product managers or data scientists or marketers who are also looking for answers to their work problems? The key is that just replicating the site is not the answer, you need to really focus on community dev and getting the thought leaders from those professionals involved. Lastly, along with the 'feed' im…

I guess programming is particularly fast moving and information becomes obsolete very quickly. A book about mobile app development written in 2005 would be laughably obsolete today. A mechanical engineer on the other hand can probably still find value in books written in the 1960s.

So there's less need to be constantly feeling out new undocumented territory in other professions.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#122

Post by mkartic »

chavesn wrote: post #66
taspeotis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1]. There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearl…

Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost? In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

very well put. Both obscure and implicit/obvious information can be very hard to find by just reading the manual.

(Aside from above) I love Python. I only know enough to get by though. I have this program that runs for a really long time, storing the results of each iteration in a dict. These results are complex python objects, and are meant to be processed later on.

Naturally, I tried pickling them. As the file grew, Pickle quickly became cumbersome. It was a bad idea to read and write something that big every iteration. I started wondering if there was some way to write pickle objects incrementally. Then googled it, and an answer from SO led me to the 'shelve' module. It does exactly that, pickling objects incrementally. Its part of Python's standard library. But it didn't turn up on the first page of google's results. It is described in the docs as a 'persistent, dictionary-like object'. Well, if not for SO, I would have been stuck with the wrong set of keywords to search with. So, my point is, even if things ARE in the manual, it takes some effort finding it. And SO does an excellent job of leading you on to the right places in the manual/reference rather than just looking down upon you for not grokking the entire manual.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#123

Post by patrickg »

(Not read the article yet, just answering to the question for myself.)

I sometimes use stackexchange network (more precisely: tex.stackexchange.com) to provide many, many answers and I have spent hours over hours there, mainly to procrastinate. So, before reading the article, I'd say it evens out. But stackoverflow really helps me a lot.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#124

Post by CJefferson »

jc4p wrote: post #20
InclinedPlane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think StackOverflow is pretty good. It's always nice to see it popup in search results when googling for a technical problem, for example. My main complaint is that they've been resting on their laurels for quite a while, there's a lot of potential that's been wasted with SO/SE.

Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't? Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)

My main with stack overflow, as it gets older, is answer rot. A couple of times I have come across answers which have become out of date, but it is non obvious to me the best way to reopen the question (I, along with most readers don't have the karma to edit questions / answers )

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#125

Post by pjbrunet »

CJefferson wrote: post #124
jc4p wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't? Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)

My main with stack overflow, as it gets older, is answer rot. A couple of times I have come across answers which have become out of date, but it is non obvious to me the best way to reopen the question (I, along with most readers don't have the karma to edit questions / answers )

Maybe write a comment, "This is out of date. Can someone update this?" You might even want to flag the question. You can also add a new answer and downvote the obsolete answer. Getting enough points to edit questions is pretty easy.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#127

Post by marvin »

chavesn wrote: post #66
taspeotis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1]. There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearl…

Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost? In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

Way higher. Technical documentation is only in rare cases easy to read, whereas SO answers are specifically incentivized to be easily accessible. And any comparison assumes that you can get instantly to the right page of the FM by making a web search, which is far from reality in most cases.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#128

Post by marvin »

Stratoscope wrote: post #96
lukev wrote: post #87

I believe it. And that's not even counting looking up answers or getting your questions answered. When I am truly stumped, I immediately start drafting a comprehensive SO question. Nine times out of ten, clearly enunciating the problem leads me directly to the answer and I never even post it.

If you're feeling generous, go ahead and post the question anyway, along with the answer you found. That's very much encouraged, and very helpful to people searching for answers later.

Half my SO answers are of this type. And the number of views I get on them usually indicates that the problem is very common. (I have done SharePoint development in the past).

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#129

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

For me StackOverflow is similar to wikipedia:

- stackoverflow tends to have the most relevant answer when searching on a programming problem .

- wikipedia tends to have the most relevant answer when searching for broader/more general knowledge, .

Also recently I took up adding details to answers on stackoverflow that help me, or that have incomplete answers.

Re: Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?

#130

Post by talkingquickly »

chavesn wrote: post #66
taspeotis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1]. There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearl…

Why do people assume that RTFM does not have a cost? In fact, it's probably higher than searching SO through Google. This is why I'm hugely in favor of even basic questions getting answers on SO.

True but I think people often assume, mistakenly, that SO will have a lower cost than RTFM. A great example is Postgres authentication, there are hundreds if not thousands of questions on this topic on SO, almost all of which would be answered by reading the very concise, very accessible section of the Postgres manual.

Not suggesting there's anything wrong with using SO for this but that the cost of reading the manual for these purposes would actually be far lower.

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