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Kinda a Big Announcement

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#51

Post by kbenson »

mattmanser wrote: post #21
AlexandrB wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think it used to be, but IIRC some time after Stack Overflow became popular they started actually gating it. Probably because there were people researching questions posed on SO and answering them from info on EE.

If so, that was a catch-22 for them. Either leave them available and watch the only thing making your site useful be rapidly transcribed onto a different and now more popular site (whether by people playing into the gamification or scraping as used to be the norm doesn't make a difference here), or close it off and allow their more use hostile experience to force them into irrelevance. That's a tough place to be. By the time it became an obvious problem SO was probably too far ahead to catch even if they pivoted immediately, as I'm not sure anyone ever really felt any loyalty to EE with it's poor usability bordering on UX hostility.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#52

Post by twic »

necovek wrote: post #30
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 docum…

The third hit for me is https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html

Maybe Googlebot is reading this thread.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#53

Post by arduinomancer »

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago.

I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021.

I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this.

Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#54

Post by cactus2093 »

necovek wrote: post #30
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 docum…

I also frequently run into the situation where I Google something, there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". But often that alternative solution is not relevant in the general case, and there really are good reasons to want to do the thing as originally asked in the question.

Basically there are all kinds of situations where the specific question/answer format is actually at odds with generating good long-term documentation.

But that makes me all the more impressed with the success Stack Overflow has had. In my opinion their key insight is that it can be good enough. If I had come up with the idea for the product I probably would have been discouraged and given up way too early based on the fact that it is and will always be messy and imperfect.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#55

Post by shadowgovt »

necovek wrote: post #30
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 docum…

But if you're looking for something as specific as the documentation in Python itself for setattr, why wouldn't you do

```

> python

Python 3.7.4 (default, Aug 13 2019, 20:35:49)

[GCC 7.3.0] :: Anaconda, Inc. on linux

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> help(setattr)

```

Or if you want the documentation on specifically Python.org, use Google search but type

`setattr site:python.org`

?

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#56

Post by shadowgovt »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #29
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.

This highlights something I believe to be a deeper truth about programming in general: the whys matter, sometimes more than the hows.

So much of programming is patterns that exist for extremely arbitrary reasons (note: not acausal reasons, just reasons that are unimportant to the immediate problem domain one is trying to solve, or perhaps important in a way one doesn't yet know). Knowing those reasons can give you some mental hooks to hang the arbitrariness off of.

COM, which Joel mentions anecdotally at the top of the article, is a great example of that. I think the biggest challenge people have remembering why COM works the way it does is it's there to solve a problem that primarily the Microsoft software ecosystem had, which didn't show up in other software ecosystems as strongly: Microsoft had a vested financial interest in enabling developers to create closed-source binary blobs that could interact with each other via exposed objects.

Though COM is language-agnostic, most examples from textbooks of the mid-'90s era reveal the big problem it's solving: C++ was the hot language at the time, but C++ doesn't standardize name-mangling, so two arbitrary binary blobs of C++ code from two different compilers weren't guaranteed to be able to use the objects in each other's libraries. This isn't a problem Apple's software stack saw so often (Apple had fewer toolchains, so compiler incompatibility was less frequent a problem) and it was rarely a problem in the open-source OS ecosystems (if you're passing around source code instead of closed-source binary blobs, you don't care about name-mangling issues because you're building the source as a lump under the watchful eye of one compiler). But in the Windows world, with a pile of choices for compiler and a business need to support closed-source binary blobs that could expose objects, it was hell.

It's helpful in understanding COM to understand why Microsoft's ecosystem needed a way for closed-source libraries to expose objects in a language-agnostic way.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#57

Post by kuang_eleven »

necovek wrote: post #30
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 docum…

I just tried this, and the official python language docs came in third with SA just after. Now, for sure, it should be first, instead of the dumbed down tutorials, but it's certainly on the first page.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#58

Post by fennecfoxen »

kbelder wrote: post #17
fennecfoxen wrote: post #9

Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of man…

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.

Monica was just the spark that lit the fire of the community-management disaster, but they'd been stockpiling fuel. Even the pronoun question itself was only raised as part of a somewhat clumsy top-down directive to move away from the "ideal questions and answers are universal and impersonal" approach that had previously served to render the matter of pronouns a non-issue. As things progressed, it soon became clear that Stack Overflow's corporate strategy was to try its hardest to stick their collective fingers in their ears and throw volunteers under the bus.

A thoughtful reader can imagine how pseudonymous moderators of the LGBT stack exchanges might be shocked by the company itself breaching an expectation of privacy, talking to the press using the volunteer's real name, and radically misrepresenting her position. What might be next? Might some of them be outed? Would a Google search for their name, too, reveal only the Stack Overflow controversy?

One open letter reads: "Stack Exchange has rewarded years of service by putting one of its volunteers in danger – and there’s now a very real feeling that we may no longer be safe on this platform." https://dearstack.artofcode.co.uk/

A resigning LGBTQ moderator wrote of the broader situation, "[Stack Exchange draws] vocal bigots from the woodwork with prompts to discussion, and then [vanishes], forcing us to decide between tacit approval through silence or defense of our own against an unchanging torrent of bigotry." https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-stack-e...

A lot of volunteers just went straight out the door.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#59

Post by tessierashpool »

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 remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. 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.

yep, Stack Overflow eliminated a whole ecosystem of fantastic personal blogs. I get a ton of value out of SO, I'm not trying to hate on it unthinkingly, but there's tradeoffs in everything.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#60

Post by greggyb »

necovek wrote: post #30
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 docum…

The sample you gave (and my experience in general) has official docs on the first page, but unfortunately below the fold. Top answers include various tutorial sites and an SO answer.

Ninja edit: my default search engine is DDG.

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