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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Comparing our site scope to Stack Overflow

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Comparing our site scope to Stack Overflow

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We've had discussions before about the site's intended scope (range of permissible topics and questions), but for new users coming from the Stack Exchange network, I think it would be useful to draw an explicit comparison with Stack Overflow and related sites.

The Stack Exchange network has several sites aside from Stack Overflow that nominally relate to programming. Even setting aside the ones that are more about information technology, database administration, networking etc., we have (from oldest to newest according to the list):

  • Game Development

  • Software Engineering (formerly Programmers)

  • Code Review

  • Code Golf

  • Computational Science

  • Computer Science

  • Data Science

  • Open Source

  • Artificial Intelligence

  • DevOps

  • Operations Research (? This seems to be a subset of computational science and/or data science, but I don't really understand it)

  • Programming Language Design and Implementation

And some slightly more tangential sites:

  • Software Quality Assurance & Testing (a separate task, but developers must often do their own testing)

  • Cryptography (also relevant to mathematicians generally)

  • Reverse Engineering (this plausibly encompasses "targets" that aren't programs)

  • Software Recommendations (could include recommendations for libraries, which are off topic on Stack Overflow)

  • Arduino (overlaps with hardware development)

  • Computer Graphics (overlaps with hardware considerations)

  • Retrocomputing (about history rather than problem-solving; concerns both hardware and software)

  • Internet of Things

  • Computer Science Educators

  • Quantum Computing

  • GenAI (maybe?)

as well as sites about specific kinds of "hardware" that might be programmable (Robotics, of course; but there's a Bricks site about Lego generally, and Lego Mindstorms products are programmable), technologies where programming might be relevant (such as Bitcoin), etc.

How much of this is intended to be encompassed within this site's scope? Can we reject making analogous sites on Codidact, on the basis that Software already covers them?

What about if we consider questions in terms of the kind of question, rather than the exact topic matter? For example, do we have a looser standard for subjective questions (the sort where experts might contribute wisdom rather than knowledge)?

Contrarily, are there any questions that might be suitable for Stack Overflow, but off topic here?

discussion scope stack-overflow
posted 5 days ago
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Karl Knechtel‭
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The main difference between Stack Exchange and Codidact is that SE loves to spawn off hundreds of sites with lots of overlapping scopes, whereas Codiact has the category system, which means that contents like for example AI and GenAI could exist on the same site.

The general idea about software.codidact.com is that it contains questions asked by programmers, that in turn require a programmer to answer them.

Questions that would be on-topic at sites that were proposed and not yet launched can be asked at proposals.codidact.com, by using the corresponding site proposal tag.

Questions that have no direct match could ultimately lead to a new proposal at proposals.codidact.com, in case one believes that there is potential for a community of many active users.

As of now, this would be the status of the corresponding Stack Exchange sites:

"Tangental sites":

posted 2 days ago
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Lundin‭
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Regarding misconceptions present at SO (6 comments)
Regarding misconceptions present at SO
Lundin‭ wrote 2 days ago
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This is a bit of a rant so I kept it out of the answer:

Some sites like SO have very strange misconceptions rooted into the site culture, such as the misconception that program design and coding style questions don't belong on a programming site. That's plain silly IMO - that's not how software engineering works.

In software engineering, nothing is allowed to be subjective. But instead of just dismissing such questions into the void and pretending such matters don't exist, one should follow industry standards and consensus about best practices. Usually one can reason about things that may seem subjective and find that they actually aren't. (Example: Are there technical reasons to pick one struct coding style over the other?)

Lundin‭ wrote 2 days ago
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It is particularly important to discuss matters of program design and coding style with beginners, or otherwise they pick up bad habits from the start and carry those with them through their career. Therefore, giving everyone a forum to ask about such matters is important.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 2 days ago
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I strongly agree that program design is an important part of programming, especially for beginners but really for everybody because the things we learned when we were beginners might have since been superseded.

Karl Knechtel‭ wrote about 17 hours ago · edited about 17 hours ago
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I tend to agree with these comments and I greatly appreciate the effort put into them (and the answer). I do wonder, however, if Software might be better off with separate sections for design questions vs. implementation questions. Implementations can generally be measured in terms of correctness, memory usage, runtime etc.; but design, even if it can be evaluated from a consequentialist perspective, is more ad-hoc - the standards need to be determined, at least in part, by the people writing the answers.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 14 hours ago
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I wonder about separate categories versus tagging. I can see arguments both ways.

Lundin‭ wrote 13 minutes ago
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Karl Knechtel‭ If there would be a lot of design, coding style or "big picture" questions it may might sense to create a separate category for them. But for now such questions seem to be a minority. Also, things like coding style are far less subjective than people think. Like if I would ask a question "what is the best indention depth" the answer is 2 or 4 spaces simply because that's what some 99% of all programmers use. Proving that most programmers use either 2 or 4 spaces will be very hard however.