I'm going to stay out of this one, except to the point that my problem with
stackoverflow is none of these. It's more fundamental than that. And it's
not something that can be "fixed" on my side. (Suffice it that there might
be a Nobel Prize in medicine for someone who figures out how to do that.)
Which last part also applies to the topic that spawned this one, and is why
it is coming across as "you don't belong here".
On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 2:20 PM Joseph Brenner <doom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Attention conservation: it's unlikely I'm going to say something
> interesting you haven't thought of already.
>
> A side-discussion that came up here: should you ask questions here, or
> at stackoverflow (or both here *and* at stackoverflow).
>
> I understand the argument that it's better to talk about perl in
> public where non-perl might see it (to help counter that "perl is
> dead" impression that's floating around). Getting more involved with
> stackoverflow has been on my list for a long time... and yet I haven't
> gotten to it. Why not?
>
> (1) The barrier at stackoverflow to a beginner is probably higher than
> you think it is-- it's not at all obvious what you're allowed to do
> and what you're not at the outset.
>
> (2) Stackoverflow is centralized, I don't know really who's in control
> of it (and early on I had the impression they were a bunch of
> microsofties). Email has the virtue of being federated-- or it would
> be if we weren't all using gmail-- and if there's a web archive it's
> also indexed.
>
> (3) Stackoverflow may be "well indexed", but I haven't noticed this
> being very helpful for perl6 where many things are huffmaned down
> below the level where they can work as grep crumbs. E.g. "does" vs.
> "but" and perhaps worse "=" vs. ":=".
>
> (4) I've seen some complaints about stackoverflow moderators that
> seemed all-too-familiar-- power tripping for the sake of it. They
> seem to be a bit trigger-happy about shutting down interesting and
> illuminating discussion ("this is all just matter of opinion!").
> It's not at all unusual to do a web search on a question and end up at
> a stackoverflow page that a moderator has marked as "Closed".
>
> (5) I question how much it improves visibility to post perl6 material
> at stackoverflow: there's so much stuff there very few people look at
> the place as a whole: the only people likely to look at a perl6
> discussion are the people who are already interested in perl6.
>
--
brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates
allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
