kilon alios writes: > Yeah StackOverflow has serious issues with moderation but still that does > not change the fact that is a popular site where tons of developers go > there to find answers to their questions. I asked my own questions on SO > about Pharo and so far I have not been disappointed.
The Prolog section does pretty well by having a small but significant community that watch the Prolog tag like hawks. There are still "drive-by moderation" incidents but by and large it isn't a huge problem. There also is no general Prolog mailing list around which to organize, so a substantial community is able to organize just around Stack Overflow instead. The big advantage of Stack Overflow is that googling your question finds it there with an actual answer. Googling your question about Pharo often lands you in the middle of a conversation on the mailing list, replicated on some random site without enough context or useful navigation, while the actual answers may be buried deep in some thread. Or the question never got answered, but people went on to talk about different things, but Google sees the question in the subject repeated many times and assumes this is a useful page. Stack Overflow doesn't let this kind of thing happen. Things tend to move so quickly with Pharo that an answer on the mailing list from 2011 is often practically useless today. That would be a problem with old Pharo questions on Stack Overflow as well, except that Stack Overflow doesn't make a point of drawing your attention to the age of the answer. It's good and bad; good that things are moving quickly and improving, bad in that a lot of that knowledge has a short shelf-life. This phenomenon seems to be shared with Smalltalk, very few books go into much detail about what's in the image, and the ones that do are all greatly outdated because what's in the image changes fast. Ruby and Javascript are also like this. Prolog is almost ideal for Stack Overflow because everybody who shows up is asking the same questions (taking the same classes at the same universities, probably), and the system hasn't changed much in the last thirty years. Stack Overflow is good at fossilizing knowledge, but not every system benefits from that. -- Daniel Lyons
