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Software recommendations category
Hello all, I was taking a look at proposed communities and saw the discussion about code reviews that lead to the creation of the category.
In the process I remembered of Software Recommendations site in SE. Shouldn't it be a category of Software Development too ? I think is different enough from normal development question in order to be categorized.
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At some extent, you can ask about (programming-related) software recommendations if you manage to narrow down the scope to something specific. A question like "which one of compiler x and compiler y currently got the best support for language standard z? I'm mainly interested in features a, b and c." would probably be fine.
What wouldn't be fine is something like "Which IDE is best for beginners learning language x?". This is too broad and unclear, it is asking for opinions, it doesn't really specify a "best criteria" other than beginner-friendly, which is very subjective.
What's mostly problematic and unlikely to be interesting/relevant to future users are "where can I find x" questions. This could come with all of the previously mentioned problems and additionally the issue of links dying over time. We don't want to create a site which some 5 years from now is just a big collection of dead links - that's how a site loses credibility. Also links to external sites are problematic because of safety and spamming attempts. In addition, "where can I find x" has a high risk of boiling down to low quality "google this for me" requests.
Software Recommendations would mean we had to create yet another category with yet another set of posting policies. I don't think we can justify broadening the scope again unless we have reason to think adding another category would mean significantly increased traffic in that category. The Code Review one has very low traffic (~1 post/month), to the point where it's hard to justify its existence.
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Shouldn't it be a category of Software Development too?
Probably not
Unless it is a very specific question as in the examples provided by Lundin which are clearly related to software development, I would not like general software recommendations on Software Development:
- Power User Codidact already seems to welcome such questions
- We already have quite a big scope and I would extend it only for questions directly connected to the software development process.
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