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Kinda a Big Announcement

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#91

Post by HWR_14 »

BeefWellington wrote: post #48
khazhoux wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It resonated for me because 10 years ago I worked on a COM project (browser extension that had to support IE) and the total lack of information for that "pre-internet" technology meant I had to rely on very hard to find books. There was one book in particular that without it, the project would have failed. And that's what everything used to be like (well, more like before Internet, not necessarily before Stack Overfl…

Having stopped writing COM components in the early 2000s, back then there were very good resources at Microsoft's site (MSDN) as well as within the Visual Studio help. It's interesting to hear it got worse just ten years later but kind of doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't upkeep that kind of documentation.

I did a COM project around the same time. It took a little bit of searching, but I found an excellent tutorial on a random site. Something that could not have existed at StackOverflow because it didn't answer a specific question, any question it answered would have been downvoted, and it would have been difficult to find there.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#92

Post by bitwize »

ilaksh wrote: post #85
mikewarot wrote: post #14

The days before Stack Overflow were far better. A search used to return a blog post in which a person described a bug, how they got there, and the resolution. The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't ask nicely", etc. Long ago I learned to route around it.

Really?? I remember frequently running into a site that was strangely named ExpertSexchange and having to fight through ads to get information.

It was supposed to be Experts Exchange and... yeah, bad choice of domain name, especially since "sex change" is an outdated term now considered a slur, on par with "Eskimo".

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#93

Post by xdennis »

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…

> Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here

Especially since Stack Overflow was created specifically as a better expertsexchange (with a better name too).

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#94

Post by the_jeremy »

Graffur wrote: post #83
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…

Honestly I've used stack overflow since it started and read tech news daily. I do not know or care about Monica Cellio or internet/twitter drama. I would bet money that if I asked any of my friends or colleagues they wouldn't know either.

Sure. That's a little like saying you use Wikipedia regularly. I have ~10k rep on Stack Overflow from >200 answers, but I'm still a small fry compared to the volunteer moderators and the true power users.

There are people who spend an insane number of hours closing or editing basic "How do I do this" questions that would otherwise overwhelm the site (whether or not you agree with the standard these users set for the site is a separate discussion). When Monica got removed, the people who had made SO a significant part of their identity were understandably upset (the fact that she managed to raise >$25k to sue SO for defamation[0] should show just how upset). Why should anyone try to make the site better when SO was insulting its most helpful users and self-sabotaging?

I dramatically cut down on my time spent learning by answering questions. It's certainly a minority that did so, but I think it's a formerly-prolific minority.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/02/stack_overflow_settle...

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#95

Post by chiph »

devit wrote: post #80

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.

The writer is the person who added VBA to Excel + the MS Office suite. Where you used COM to make use of external libraries/programs. I assure you, he's not ignorant.

Is COM obsolete today? For new development, yes. But Microsoft still supports it and you can still write .net code that gets exposed as COM objects.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#96

Post by Snarwin »

shpx wrote: post #75
necovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.g…

Alternatively: set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and type `!python setattr`.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#98

Post by necovek »

shpx wrote: post #75
necovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.g…

Thank you for your elaborate answer. Now please provide it for Firefox.

And Postgresql. And Flask. Now I am using aiohttp here. SQLAlchemy please. Pytest. Sorry, now in the Rust world. Get me some MDN for Javascript. w3.org for CSS3 spec, pleaaaseee!

You see where this is going? Python.org was an example to illustrate a point.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#99

Post by lowbloodsugar »

stingraycharles wrote: post #63
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…

Yup. I remember in 2005 I was teaching my fellow students a “debugging” course, which was of course not normally part of a curriculum. It basically involved “copy / paste your compiler error into Google and tada.wav, you’ll have mailing lists or Usenet or blog posts about your issues”. SO changed some of that landscape, but it was mostly a better ExpertsExchange.

I remember ExpertsExchange. What a PITA. SO is a better ExpertsExchange in the same way a car is a better horse. Not showing me the fucking answer would probably be #1 usability issue for a site I visited to "show me a fucking answer".

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#100

Post by microtherion »

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…

Even to the extent that was true, you almost certainly could not get back there. Today, a search query that has no good answers tends to throw up lots of SEO tarpits leading to pages containing nothing but the search keywords, some connecting verbiage, and ads/trojans/popovers.
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