Online forums and Q&A sites are very helpful in giving answers to technical questions. That is until when they are not.
In a recent Stack Overflow podcast, Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky illustrated how most of the online forums work (or don’t):
Jeff: Some guys come to web forums and ask programming questions and they are like “I need to bang the nail into the wall. Should I use this old shoe or should I use this glass bottle? I tried the glass bottle and it kinda breaks the bottle, and the shoe is very inefficient”.
Jeol: Right, and people are always like “You shouldn’t be putting nails in your walls”
Instead of saying you should use a hammer, people almost always say something to the effect of you are using the wrong kind of nail.
Now, Stack Overflow adds an interesting twist to this problem by adding voting and editing features to question and answers. It is a Q&A website for programmers that doesn’t even need you to sign-up to ask or answer questions!
The voting system allows the best answers to be at the top while wiki-style editing means that anyone can edit any question/answer to make the posts better. Clever idea, and it is working too. It is the best programming Q&A website I have ever seen.
If you are a programer and still haven’t visited Stack Overflow yet, now is the time to check it out.
A bad thing about Stack Overflow is that the community is not a newbie friendly one. If you are a beginner, you will see a lot of your questions voted down.
Another thing I noted is that most of the people are not interested in algorithms/mathematics. If you ask something related to algorithms, you will get very less number of answers.
Let us hope that these problems will eventually get sorted out.
Stack Overflow is an outcome of really an efficient idea! But the issue is that people are so used to the forums and discussions that it would need some time for the people to get accustomed to it, change looks difficult to be accepted….!