Kinda a Big Announcement • Hacker News Board

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#21

Post by mattmanser » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #20

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

> Before SO, when I googled a problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum. Even more likely, you would get links to Experts Exchange, which was ad-riddled with the actual answer behind a paywall. I'm glad that SO was able to at least kill that business model. Someone should do the same for Pintrest and their dominance of Google Images.

The actual answer was always at the bottom if you scrolled down far enough. Lot of dark patterns on that site.

I personally disagree with tdeck, Joel and Jeff deserve a lot of kudos, as an oldie myself SO was an absolute game changer for programmers.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#22

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

exhilaration wrote: post #19

kbelder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved. They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.

It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either. I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.

As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content moderation and quality over time.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#23

Post by lliamander » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

Talking with developers who started their career in the early 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software development over the past 30 years are:

- the rise of easily shared open source libraries and applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and Github)

- crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow)

It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts with the code, but the way programmers work together.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#24

Post by johnfn » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

bosswipe wrote: post #18

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

I definitely used to buy and read more books back then, and documentation in general. Maybe that was a good thing.

I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape." There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#25

Post by neogodless » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

The contrast from bookstore to single site Q&A is exaggerated, but I was around before Stack Overflow. The problem was not just that there wasn't a single (popular, highly active) site, and not just that you had to sift through search results. It's that if you didn't find your answer, you didn't know for sure where to post your problem, and actually expect to get answers. You might post it on a personal blog or forum, and then wait a very long time to see if a response would appear. Often it would not (or it was something you already tried or something else that didn't work), and you'd be on your own, and if other people were lucky, you'd document the eventual solution (but often, you did not.)

Stack Overflow gave you a central place for you to ask questions, and (within a pretty reasonable time frame) start to get suggested solutions to try and consider.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#26

Post by johnfn » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

I think you might be giving Spolsky a bit too little credit! I remember the days before SO as well, and while you might luck out by finding your answer in some obscure niche blog, there was a relatively high chance that that error message you were staring at wouldn't have an accessible solution online (or at least not one that Google could provide). You could really just get stuck on a problem for a day, or never find the solution at all and have to work around it otherwise. SO was really a night and day change in how readily accessible it made programming information.

And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a book just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and outs of the syntax? I used to do that all the time, and then I immediately stopped when SO became popular because I could just google for what I wanted and SO would always tell me.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#27

Post by OJFord » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

exhilaration wrote: post #19

kbelder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved. They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.

It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either. I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.

The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators having changed their display name to things like ' - Reinstate Monica'.

Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that. (I still see them.)

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#28

Post by bad_username » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

Right. I taught myself how to make web sites (both front and back) in 1999 purely online without much difficulty.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#29

Post by CodeGlitch » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #23

Talking with developers who started their career in the early 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software development over the past 30 years are: - the rise of easily shared open source libraries and applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and Github) - crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow) It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts with t…

What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your understanding of the domain in question.

People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung heroes of the open source world.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#30

Post by necovek » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down.

As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org documentation: none of them show it on the first page for me.