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 What questions are we most urgently missing?
Parent
What questions are we most urgently missing?
Context: As you may be aware, recent poorly received changes on Some Other website are likely to have pushed a lot of their regulars to a breaking point.
Nowadays, Codidact (and specifically Software) seems like the only place commonly mentioned as a viable alternative.
So I think it behooves us to act quickly to make the community seem as viable as possible. I'd like for new arrivals to see an active community engaged in producing the kind of content that the "Q&A site" model excels at (at least in theory), and immediately see what we're about (and how we differ) without having to rely on years-old, stumbling attempts to define ourselves. And this largely depends on new content; there's clearly a ton of important questions left unasked and unanswered so far.
Specifically, for new arrivals with more answers than questions, I'd like them to see the value in posing these kinds of questions anyway, even if they're "artificial". And for those with more questions than answers, it'd be great if their first impression is that they can get answers here by searching.
The historical evidence is pretty clear about the kinds of questions that are most important (as judged by the interest of the general population of programmers in having them answered), but trends have changed over time in such a way that a simple statistical analysis (of what's been most upvoted, viewed, closed-as-duplicate etc.) elsewhere would be misleading. (Not to mention, those metrics don't always align with reality, because of factors like what experts are interested in answering, and because of the difficulty of curating and recognizing duplicates, etc.)
I therefore submit this as a brainstorming thread to collect ideas about what needs to get written. My idea is that everyone can make their own list of ideas for new Q&A, on the basic, "famous" topics (things that a lot of programmers would be able to answer easily, but others would nevertheless need answered).
Some specific requests:
-
Please don't worry too much about categorization. Unless it helps you think.
-
Please hide your entire list in a
<details>tag.I have a few reasons for this:
-
I generally want to encourage use of this feature across the site, because it helps a lot with scanning over the longer questions and answers that Software topics often require (despite seeming superficially simple) and because it showcases part of the character and culture of the site, as compared to those that came before it.
-
I don't want people to worry about duplicating others' suggestions. In fact, if this happens incidentally (to people who weren't checking for duplication), it serves as a vote for a specific suggestion. We can always edit together and compile a master list later (and in fact I plan to).
-
I want the first impression of this thread to be that many people are contributing, and to emphasize who is standing up for the effort. Contrarily, I don't want anyone to feel intimidated out of contributing a short list (or even just a single idea; you can always add more later!) because someone else contributed a long list. (But do consider checking others' lists if you think you'll be inspired!)
-
-
Please give just the titles of your proposed questions; for the kind of question I have in mind, a basic idea of what the question might contain should already be clear from the title. I'm looking mainly for the kinds of things that are common gotchas, stumbling blocks or "unknown unknowns" for less inexperienced programmers. I recognize that writing a good question, even about very easy subject matter, is often not as simple as it looks; that's exactly why I suggest that you don't get into it right now. If you know there's something important but can't quite phrase a title, just putting "Something about [specific topic]" is fine for now.
-
If you have the time, please don't hesitate to start writing up questions. (If you can also answer them, great! If not, still fine!) Go ahead and crack open some
<details>tags. My model is that this thread is a "living to-do list" with no clear time of completion; so if you see a good idea on anyone's list and want to run with it, run with it. There is no point in waiting.
Post
I think with the modest user base we've had so far, questions get tilted towards what expertize we do happen to have around, rather than towards which languages that are most commonly used.
Overall, I think we just need general programming language usage topics, mainly beginner to intermediate, for all the major programming/script languages. To see what we are missing the most, it might be helpful to look at SO statistics. In the history of SO, these are the top 10 sorted from most common first:
- JavaScript + libraries
- Python
- Java
- C#
- PHP
- HTML and CSS
- C++
- SQL
- R
- C
(11th place ASP, 12th place Ruby)
Looking at the most frequent tags here at Codidact, we should be seeing more JavaScript questions in particular since that's by far the most popular one at SO. The trend at SO is that it has taken over the #1 position from C# and/or Java that used to hold it.
And there are barely any R questions here despite that one being the 9th most popular language.
0 comment threads