Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by dd_roger on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:06AM (#25969166)

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

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Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by Netcob on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:23AM (#25969291)

My experiences with Stack Overflow until recently:

- Using it as a useful resource for small issues

- Seeing memes about how programmers essentially just copy/paste code from Stack Overflow all day long

- Reading comments about how Stack Overflow is severely outdated and any question will be shut down immediately

And then I had an issue with library A which was using library B but had a small inconsistency in how it used it that made my use case very difficult. So I posted a question. The developer of library B appeared, agreeing that it's a problem. Followed by the developer of library A, who agreed as well and said the fix would be in the next release. 2-3 days later, my bug was fixed by updating library A.

With a sample of one, that doesn't really say anything, my view of that website is a bit biased now.

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Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by marcosdumay on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:22AM (#25969281)

That depends on your environment.

When programming in Haskell or Rust, going into SO is basically a waste of time, and the documentation or some specific search engine (yeah, hoogle) are the place to go.

When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else.

When programming in Python or Javascript, it completely depends on what libraries and frameworks you are using.

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Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by sdevonoes on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:32PM (#25970994)

> When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else.

Not even in the official documentation? Wow.

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Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by marcosdumay on Saturday January 30, 2021 @03:55PM (#25972898)

The basic C# libraries are full of undocumented surprising behavior, and surprising behavior that is documented only on thematic docs and not on the function docs. And most of the ecosystem follow the convention.

There are many people that insist the .Net environment is well documented because there is documentation for every single item, but that documentation is far from complete.

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Re:Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut d... by EamonnMR on Saturday January 30, 2021 @09:16AM (#25969242)

Stack overflow is very useful if someone already asked your question back when it was still accepting new questions.

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