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Kinda a Big Announcement

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#71

Post by mattlondon »

Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for some.

Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale". E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just so out of date that I personally do not put value on it.

As such I personally avoid it now like I used to avoid experts exchange that was the stack-overflow-before-stack-overflow.

I wonder if I am alone...?

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#72

Post by kbelder »

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.

I wouldn't expect you to. HN doesn't report on everything happening in every online community.

It was a thing Stack Exchange did to a Stack Exchange community moderator, that had a big impact on those involved with the Stack Exchange community. I didn't mean to imply that the repercussions were felt around the world; just that it was a big deal in the group that was intimately involved.

There were newspaper articles and half a dozen HN threads about it, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#73

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Yeah, what is this all about SO changing things overnight. Exaggering by far. It took years and years before SO became a more useful resource and for a long time (maybe even still I'd argue) was a joke that it was a haven for lame Q's and dangerous A's.

Everyone was referencing blogs and google groups (usenet before) and searches.. hitting sites like ExpertsExchange etc. What code languages/scenes were active around then too -- Ruby/Rails stuff = blogs/groups. PHP? = forums, even the comment sections of the PHP docs.

Alot of what changed gradually around then was the rise in better documentation out there. So much better/more emphasis on writing proper docs etc

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#74

Post by quietbritishjim »

mattlondon wrote: post #71

Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for some. Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale". E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just so out of date that I personally…

Given you mention Chrome, maybe you are a JS dev, and maybe things move a bit faster for that language/ecosystem than for others (to put it mildly).

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#75

Post by shpx »

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…

On Chrome, go to chrome://settings/

Search for "search engines"

Open "Manage search engines"

Under "Other search engines" click on "Add" (on the right)

Add this custom search engine:

- Search engine: Python docs (first result)

- Keyword: p

- URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=site:docs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky

Install the "Redirect Google Redirects" extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-google-re... (otherwise you'll see a "Redirect Notice" page)

You can also add this search engine:

- Python3 docs

- pp

- {google:baseURL}search?q=site%3Adocs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s

Now, when you need to search for the Python documentation, just type "p setattr" and it'll go straight to https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html or you can search "pp setattr" and it'll show you the search results, filtered only for docs.python.org/3/

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#78

Post by zwieback »

neogodless wrote: post #25
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…

For me there were three phases:

- pre-web: experts concentrated on Usenet

- early-web: Usenet decline and counter-productive decentralization

- SO (and others): recentralization

I think the SO guys just had a good-enough formula at exactly the right time and everybody jumped on fast enough

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#79

Post by SLWW »

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 that now, more then ever, any programmer that has started in the last 6-8 years will have the experience that Joel states.

Though for those of us who has been doing this for 15 years, that is not the case.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#80

Post by devit »

The article writer is quite ignorant.

COM is not obsolete at all, it's the main way Windows APIs have been and are provided from the release of DirectX until now, where it underlies the current WinRT API.

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