Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community? • Hacker News Board

fallingfrog wrote: post #14

People use the word community in such false ways. I've heard phrases like "the pancake eating community" and so on. People who eat pancakes aren't a community. Your community consists of the people who will let you stay at their house if yours floods. Or the people who will come and get you if your car breaks down. That's a community.

> if yours floods

Increasingly in the west local communities are weakened, and these tasks are taken up by government services. That's why online communities thrive: they allow people who are dispersed all over the place to coordinate.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#25

Post by sloaken » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 3:59 PM UTC

Because programming, although a subset of IT, is very broad. There are a lot of communities, not just a single one. I personnaly LOVE stackoverflow, Joel is my HERO, but it is more of a question and answer forum. CodeProject is more of a community, and might fit your needs.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#26

Post by NVRM » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

Yep, let forums comes back. They died mostly because phpBB was an absolute mess.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#27

Post by NVRM » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

mromanuk wrote: post #7

I see programmers discussing all over, for example in Github Issues, or Stackoverflow. Always topic based discussions, obviously. They lack the social interaction and freedom to think more broadly about programming and solutions, though. Is that what you are talking about? Edit: grammar

Too exclusive^

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#28

Post by thepra » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

No one is mentioning DevRant...

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#29

Post by tiensonqin » Sat, Jun 02, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

Hidifferent.com is a website to share knowledge and learn about different cultures. I'm still working on it, :)

I've created some programming communities, for example: https://hidifferent.com/clojure https://hidifferent.com/rust https://hidifferent.com/ocaml

It supports sub channels and anyone can create public or invite-only communities.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community?

#30

Post by vinayms » Sat, Jun 02, 2018, 8:39 AM UTC

I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the topic, or repeat what others might have said 10 pages back? There are many phpboard like forums dedicated for games, linux etc which are of this nature.

For a more controlled kind of discussions, the current preeminent site for such activity is stackexchange. Sure, it has its flaws - its strictly qna style, is filled with elitist and intolerant mods - but for most questions that are not of the form "how to do X with API Y on platform Z", you will find discussion in comments. Even on stackoverflow which primarily encourages questions of the above form, there are enough discussions. The softwareenginering site is much better for slightly opinionated discussions disguised as questions and answers; so are workplace, unix etc.