"Perl has been pretty much forgotten" says Spolsky

[sln]

RM> Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.

We've had this dust-up with Mr. DeFaria before. You're better off just
plonking him.

Charlton

[Sorry. This message is no longer available.]

EasyNews sucks Donkey Dick !!!

-sln

 

[Ben Bullock]

I haven't used stackoverflow yet so I can't comment on the quality of
the answers in general.

The answers really aren't very good. Like Wikipedia, it superficially
seems to contain useful information, but closer inspection will reveal
many problems. On the other hand, what is so impressive about the site
is the forum software itself, which is by far the best I've ever used.

 

[brian d foy]

The answers really aren't very good.

A lot of answers are less than thoughtful and lacking in experience,
but the Perl section has been doing very nicely. There are some very
clueful Perl people who answer most of the questions, but once in a
while there's a lull where a newbie will pop his head up before one of
those people can get there.

It mostly works out.

The answers will certain suffer if all of the experienced people leave,
though. I don't go to stackoverflow to get answers (I know about
Google), but I want to ensure it's not going to be another Matt's
Script Arcive.

 

[Ben Bullock]

[This is a repost since I believe the previous post of this failed.
Please excuse me if you have seen this before.]

A lot of answers are less than thoughtful and lacking in experience,
but the Perl section has been doing very nicely. There are some very
clueful Perl people who answer most of the questions, but once in a
while there's a lull where a newbie will pop his head up before one of
those people can get there.

Let's be clear what stackoverflow.com is. The site is set up as a
programming question "video game" where you're awarded "reputation"
points for answering questions. You get maybe one or two points for
asking or answering a difficult question requiring real knowledge, if
you're lucky, and some random chump doesn't decide to downvote you, and
you get lots and lots of points for asking a stupid, annoying question
like "What's your favourite pasta sauce to eat for programming?" or
answering a trivial question which could have easily been looked up on
Google. In the two or three months I spent on stackoverflow.com, I got
the most points for an answer about how to kill a buffer in Emacs. True
story: when I saw the question, I didn't know how to do it, so I looked
up on Google, found it was C-x k, wrote an answer, and "bingo", got about
200 points. It took about a minute. (And incidentally now I can get rid
of all those annoying "mydoc.pl<2>" and "mydoc.pl<3>" buffers in Emacs,
which I used to get rid of by closing Emacs and opening it again, so I
can't say I didn't learn anything from the stackoverflow.com experience.)

I also lost a lot of points by telling someone who'd commented on one of
my answers that he should look something up on Google instead of asking
me. It was pretty annoying to write correct answers to questions and have
them downvoted by ludicrous people who feel offended when someone tells
them to try to solve their own problems. What would these people make of
the "posting guidelines for comp.lang.perl.misc" I wonder? That would
probably be downvoted so much it turned a nasty shade of brown and faded
away, so you'd have to delete it just to save your reputation (and then
you'd earn a "peer pressure" badge, lucky you).

Another misfeature of the site is that the person who answers the
question first usually gets the most points, so there is a rush to answer
questions which leads to people making mistakes. For instance, I recently
caught out one of the "clueful Perl people" (= someone who has a MacBook
Air and a ponytail) with a mistake in an answer about the ~~ operator
which I don't think he'd have made if he'd thought about it for
a minute or two.

 

[Randal L. Schwartz]

Sherm> Precisely! I spent maybe two months on that site. That was long enough
Sherm> to see many patently incorrect "answers" get voted up and even
Sherm> "accepted," and to realize that the site is just a popularity
Sherm> contest. As a technical resource, it's as useless as slashdot.

It's like a really poor imitation of perlmonks.org, which has taken *years* of
tuning to get the right mix of points, editors, questions, answers,
troll-response, searching, sorting and so on. Why people think they can start
over without the benefit of a decade of experience on that, not sure.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"; # the original