Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tired of Stack Overflow

arp242.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 517 posts

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#441

Post by Const-me »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I do remember pre-SO times.

Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages, Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be productive.

A bit later, many of the vendors created their own Q&A forums, in addition to writing documentation. Such forums are focused on a single tech, so web developers don’t come to game dev forums to close other people questions they don’t understand due to lack of background. Happens every day on modern SO.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#442

Post by tripzilch »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

> You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh-tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit.

Wow, I must have been a natural talent or something /s

But seriously, programming isn't that hard. Finding the answer on SO is just a shortcut, saving some time, but it's not like the information magically grows on SO. It came from reading the docs and having a good understanding of the subject matter.

I mean yes, SO is a blessing. Super useful. But it's not as if these things were impossible to figure out by yourself.

Now, programming in the pre Internet times ... you would borrow a book from the library that was an old software version or the wrong OS, but there might be some keywords in the book's index that you could blindly try out and type to see if they do anything with your version. Then I remember getting stuck.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#443

Post by raverbashing »

Const-me wrote: post #441
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I do remember pre-SO times. Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages, Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be productive.…

Absolutely

But even with pristine MSDN documentation and lots of (pre-SO) googling some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

I think tools also evolved and it's not surprising that "HTML" won, even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#444

Post by tripzilch »

garamirez wrote: post #390
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

You're absolutely right. Most software development will be impossible today without resources like SO.

Do you really believe that? Sure it takes more effort, and finding the answer on SO can really help you speed through bumps that you would otherwise have to consult the docs about. But if you believe that it is impossible to do otherwise, then you must think the people who write answers on SO are like gods, or something.

I'm just trying to point out there's a difference between SO being a super useful resource when programming, and the voices in this thread that seem to literally say "I can't program without SO" -- to which I kinda want to say, maybe then you shouldn't write code for other people.

That may sound a bit arrogant but there's a real question behind it: Is it really true that SO allows large numbers of people to write code that they would otherwise be completely unable to write or finish? I mean, are the people who say they would get hopelessly stuck without SO, just not very good at reading docs, doing research and understanding systems? Or did they just never really try, because SO is right there on page one of the results?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#445

Post by tripzilch »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #407
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you could perfectly well find answers in the pre-Internet times; you just had to dig deeper, grub through more books, talk to more colleagues, and experiment more.

Well yeah, but you could also travel from England to Australia in the pre-aeroplane days. Today, you can do it in about 24-36 hours. Back then it took months. Isn't that an improvement?

There's a LOT of people here saying they would literally get stuck without SO. I also think that sounds a little bit more helpless than they think they are.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#446

Post by tripzilch »

tripzilch wrote: post #444
garamirez wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. Most software development will be impossible today without resources like SO.

Do you really believe that? Sure it takes more effort, and finding the answer on SO can really help you speed through bumps that you would otherwise have to consult the docs about. But if you believe that it is impossible to do otherwise, then you must think the people who write answers on SO are like gods, or something. I'm just trying to point out there's a difference between SO being a super useful resource when p…

... from another comment: "he valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time."

So there are people who believe there are programming gods who live on SO, that are the only ones with the knowledge to answer certain questions ...

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#447

Post by Const-me »

raverbashing wrote: post #443
Const-me wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember pre-SO times. Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages, Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be productive.…

Absolutely But even with pristine MSDN documentation and lots of (pre-SO) googling some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced). I think tools also evolved and it's not surprising that "HTML" won, even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

> some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

Modern SO doesn’t help with hard problems either, such questions often closed as “too broad”.

> even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

C++ is just too low level for GUI. Look at WPF or UWP, both are miles ahead of HTML even with modern webdev stuff like react, but they work fast.

I think the main reason why HTML won is Apple, and modern mobiles. Building multiple rich GUI applications for Windows, iOS, Android is too expensive for many people, the platforms are too different. Even before HTML5 arrived, it was possible to build a single web app: JS workarounds for cross-browser compatibility, and different styles/layouts to support both mobile and desktop browsers.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#448

Post by Grue3 »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

It's not a blessing. It bred an entire class of programmers who are unable to write anything without copypasting chunks of code from the Internet, and unable to understand any of that code. This is where all the interview candidates who can't solve FizzBuzz come from. They never had to solve a problem, Google basically did all the work for them.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#449

Post by jasode »

paulmd wrote: post #418
jasode wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your 4 examples: /r/NoStupidQuestions/, /r/AskHistorians/, /r/legaladvice/, /r/personalfinance/ I see why those 4 subreddits influence your thinking in how StackOverflow should work so it seems like it could adopt the same (social) mechanisms and it would only improve the site and not degrade it. However, notice that there is no reddit.com/r/ProgrammersAskAnyQuestion/ comparable subreddit that has more traf…

There are most definitely programming-help subreddits on Reddit so I'm not sure what you're on about, besides insisting that we need the toxicity of StackOverflow due to "reasons".

>There are most definitely programming-help subreddits on Reddit so I'm not sure what you're on about,

Yes, I know there are already programming help subreddits. E.g. I regularly visit /r/cpp/ but the Q&A there isn't as big as the StackOverflow questions tagged [cpp]. (Even though that C++ subreddit started May 2008 is older than StackOverflow.)

What am I on about?! Please carefully note that I was talking about a _comparable_ subreddit that has similar-or-higher traffic and equal-or-higher quality of answers than StackOverflow. (I know such a subreddit doesn't exist because if it did, all the complainers about SO could simply go to that superior subreddit to get their questions answered.)

>, besides insisting that we need the toxicity of StackOverflow due to "reasons".

Nobody has to insist. For anyone who is convinced that the users with bad questions should have higher priority than the experts with answers, you can put that philosophy to a real world test.

Since StackOverflow is "toxic", I suggested making a programming help subreddit (or even make a whole new Q&A website) that removes all toxic mechanisms (no downvotes, etc, etc). You can then see if the subreddit questions attracts the quality experts -- and therefore builds up a repository of quality answers.

It's not an empty suggestion for people who think StackOverflow's social mechanisms are fundamentally wrong. Back in 2008, Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood though the old Q&A website Experts-Exchange was fundamentally flawed. Therefore, they made StackOverflow with different mechanisms. Users were disgusted with experts-exchange.com and everybody migrated en masse to StackOverflow.

So, make a new Q&A website that allows 10000 duplicates and see what happens. Maybe the new website will flourish and you will be proven correct. StackOverflow will be fade away because of the superior competition.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#450

Post by tripzilch »

shagie wrote: post #313
kelnos wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.

The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums. While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people…

I think they were talking about very useful locked questions that have 0 answers, not 296.
Post reply on HN