I do remember pre-SO times.

Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages, Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be productive.

A bit later, many of the vendors created their own Q&A forums, in addition to writing documentation. Such forums are focused on a single tech, so web developers don’t come to game dev forums to close other people questions they don’t understand due to lack of background. Happens every day on modern SO.

Absolutely

But even with pristine MSDN documentation and lots of (pre-SO) googling some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

I think tools also evolved and it's not surprising that "HTML" won, even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

> some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

Modern SO doesn’t help with hard problems either, such questions often closed as “too broad”.

> even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

C++ is just too low level for GUI. Look at WPF or UWP, both are miles ahead of HTML even with modern webdev stuff like react, but they work fast.

I think the main reason why HTML won is Apple, and modern mobiles. Building multiple rich GUI applications for Windows, iOS, Android is too expensive for many people, the platforms are too different. Even before HTML5 arrived, it was possible to build a single web app: JS workarounds for cross-browser compatibility, and different styles/layouts to support both mobile and desktop browsers.

> such questions often closed as “too broad”

Oh my questions were very specific usually

(the hardest one I remember was how to put a borderless window inside another window (because it could change) and making it all work. Think some good amount of win32 quirkiness was needed for that to work the way I wanted)

It doesn’t matter to the downvoters. Here’s a deleted question closed as “too broad”: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 Copy-pasting below.

What is the best way in C++ to calculate the coordinate of a rectangle (hyper-rectangle) in n-dimension? I have dimensions of the rectangle in a 1d vector like {1d_min , 1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max, ...., nd_min,nd_max}. For example, in 2d the dimensions are {1d_min,1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max}. And the coordinates will be {1d_min,2d_min},{1d_min,2d_max},{1d_max,2d_min},{1d_max,2d_max}. However, I want it for n-dimension.

For people with even minimal background in geometry, it’s obvious the OP wants coordinates of all vertices of an axis aligned hyper-rectangle. A good question in my book, and it has very simple and elegant answer which I wrote there (using bits from an integer vertex index to select min or max coordinates).

And to prove your point, the question has now been removed.

If that documentation and forums were so good then why, do you suppose, that SO has been so wildly successful?

Wow. We had really different pre-SO experiences.

I found MSDN so filled with unexplained parameters and fields, hyper-linked to other unexplained classes, that I gave up and haven’t tried again.

Where did you find the well written documentation?

Preach, my brother!

SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity. I wish every profession out there could have a resource like this.

People often share negative experiences asking question in SO but really, I can't fathom how that could happen. Just follow the composition rules, take a few minutes to write and research your question and you will be fine. Don't be so lazy.

If you have a question that hasn't already been asked, its worth it to take the time, follow the rules and do it properly. Don't think of it as YOUR question, its the community's question.

"SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity."

I think it's time to pick up my toys and go home. And never return here.

That's probably for the best

"SO is a blessing for humanity."

My opinion is that "Stack Overflow" vastly exacerbated the eternal September effect -- people went there for instant gratification (of both the question and the answer variety), instead of focusing writing better manual pages. Yes, manual pages. The ones written in nroff. Those.

"I like Linux because I can find an answer to anything within seconds on Stack Overflow" (a "UNIX systems administrator" once told me that to my face) is not a good reason to adopt any technology, any programming language, or anything at all.

From my point of view, "Stack Overflow" is one of the great evils of the information technology industry: nobody bothers to think about the problem and research it any more. It's all about instant gratification and non-existent or shitty documentation nowadays. Great evil befell us all.

It's not a blessing. It bred an entire class of programmers who are unable to write anything without copypasting chunks of code from the Internet, and unable to understand any of that code. This is where all the interview candidates who can't solve FizzBuzz come from. They never had to solve a problem, Google basically did all the work for them.

While of course this problem exists, SO didn’t create them, but maybe enabled them at most. What created them was a big cycle starting with the internet leading to digital transformation and new business creation, which led to demand for new programmers, which led to college enrollment demand, and parents pushing their kids into a lucrative field. Lots of variables of course, but some (or many) of those recent college grads only passed due to rote memorization despite their inability to grasp basic concepts like abstraction.

So what if SO helped someone to get to the resume phase who perhaps shouldn’t be there? There’s only one way for them to figure that out, and it’s experience. Give them some constructive criticism and move on.

You cannot blame SO. That class has always existed, instead in earlier times they copied the code off Usenet or something.

I remember digging through .NET forums to find answers for working with ASP record sets. 100% not fun.

Nothing is perfect and SO has its warts — but it’s far better than anything we’ve ever had.

What about Usenet? I was happy with Dejavu!

I’m so glad I don’t have to use expertsexchange anymore. People don’t realize how good we have it now.

You would finally find a perfect match for your problem, only to scroll down to blurred out answers. Oh the frustration.

But the good times came back with Google delisting threats (you cannot show different content to Googlebot VS users).

This meant you could keep scrolling and what do you see - a few pages after the blurred out answers were the real answers!

In those days I used to do Perl. The Perl cookbook and the camel book were pretty good.

Then Perlmonks was like a Perl specific version of Stack overflow, with the difference that they encouraged discussion, leading you to a far deeper understanding of the language. I miss that.

(It still going, its pretty ugly but the content is better than SO). https://perlmonks.org/

I enjoyed the pre-internet times when it came to programming far more than I do today. This is because of flow states.

I have a hard time getting into a flow state when I'm looking something up, but when I know the language inside and out it's easy for me to get into a flow state.

So much so, when I learn a language I try to know it well enough to never have to google for help. Of course, I still google around at times, but I find the less I have to the happier my day is.

SO is a blessing, but it's also a curse. Younger devs have no idea what they're missing out on.

That's a lofty goal, which I don't think is achievable anymore, at least not in modern web development. The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with makes offline development entirely infeasible. I too try to avoid googling for language features, but for the rest of my questions, SO is invaluable.

It is a lofty goal. I've been told by coworkers, "No one can remember the entire language." and then went and did it anyways.

Yes, I still have to look up libraries for, eg pip, and I haven't gotten to the level of knowing every compiler error yet.

But it is very much a doable goal. Especially given that knowledge transfers between languages and libraries. Once you learn the thought process of the dev who wrote it, you can guess how they did or are going to do everything after that, creating a short cut where you can guess and usually always guess the right answer. It's much quicker than using SO.

> The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with

Is this because this Web programming innately needs lots of tools, etc. to work, or because the modern programming ecosystem (including stack overflow) has allowed it to grow to be this way?

I would say a little bit of both. Since modern networked programming is much more complex than before (having to care about security, distributed storage, systems, worldwide connectivity over vast range of devices etc.) it has more moving parts and thus more combinations of various systems possible. Naturally complexity grows exponentially.

>...complexity grows exponentially

Just to nitpick a bit, I would say that complexity grows quadratically - proportionally to the number of potential interactions between subcomponents.

There can be interactions among more than 2 components as well that cannot be explained just by the pairwise interactions. The number of all subsets grows exponentially.

You're absolutely right. Most software development will be impossible today without resources like SO.

Do you really believe that? Sure it takes more effort, and finding the answer on SO can really help you speed through bumps that you would otherwise have to consult the docs about. But if you believe that it is impossible to do otherwise, then you must think the people who write answers on SO are like gods, or something.

I'm just trying to point out there's a difference between SO being a super useful resource when programming, and the voices in this thread that seem to literally say "I can't program without SO" -- to which I kinda want to say, maybe then you shouldn't write code for other people.

That may sound a bit arrogant but there's a real question behind it: Is it really true that SO allows large numbers of people to write code that they would otherwise be completely unable to write or finish? I mean, are the people who say they would get hopelessly stuck without SO, just not very good at reading docs, doing research and understanding systems? Or did they just never really try, because SO is right there on page one of the results?

... from another comment: "he valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time."

So there are people who believe there are programming gods who live on SO, that are the only ones with the knowledge to answer certain questions ...

I agree that SO makes life much better. But what you're describing is a practice that is not sustainable, so of course, something replaced it. In an alternate universe where SO never happened, something has its place.

And let's not forget the fact that SO came to life in the time when web started to grow and improve a lot. It's not THE improvement; it's just one of the development improvements we grew to like.

Today it's a standard practice that 3rd party code (tools, libraries, frameworks) come with decently written docs. Specific for web development, MDN improved a lot, and it's a good summary of the full spec. Also finding data on these pages is easier than it used to be thanks to improved search engines. All of this is, in my opinion, is a reason why SO is not as important as it used to be.

The author has a good point. A great platform doesn't excuse the behaviour of its users. The least one could do is explain the downvote, to give some guidance for the future questions. They exercise their right (power) to "moderate", but not their duty to make it a better place.

That is why the current state of SO is so sad. It really was a revolution, and I can't participate because of the toxic moderation.

> You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh-tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit.

Wow, I must have been a natural talent or something /s

But seriously, programming isn't that hard. Finding the answer on SO is just a shortcut, saving some time, but it's not like the information magically grows on SO. It came from reading the docs and having a good understanding of the subject matter.

I mean yes, SO is a blessing. Super useful. But it's not as if these things were impossible to figure out by yourself.

Now, programming in the pre Internet times ... you would borrow a book from the library that was an old software version or the wrong OS, but there might be some keywords in the book's index that you could blindly try out and type to see if they do anything with your version. Then I remember getting stuck.

You mean people actually had to think a little when they encountered a problem and had to read the docs, wew hard times

Actually, you could perfectly well find answers in the pre-Internet times; you just had to dig deeper, grub through more books, talk to more colleagues, and experiment more.

Well yeah, but you could also travel from England to Australia in the pre-aeroplane days. Today, you can do it in about 24-36 hours. Back then it took months. Isn't that an improvement?

There's a LOT of people here saying they would literally get stuck without SO. I also think that sounds a little bit more helpless than they think they are.

Ridiculous analogy. It didn't take weeks or months to figure out answers in the 1980s. It just took a little more thinking. I would go so far as to say, programmers were smarter in those days because they had to be.

I think +1 posts are frowned upon here but damn this post deserves a +1

What a load of BS.

Sounds like you couldn't program before SO.