I never really liked StackOverflow. The only questions they seem to allow are “How do I get the length of a string in Python?”. Most of the problems where I am scratching my head and really need the benefit of somebody’s experience are software selection problems that aren’t allowed.

The competing answers paradigm is also fundamentally broken, I don’t want to see 15 answers to “How do I get the length of a string in Python?” I just need to see

   len(x)

Programming splogs do better than SO does in this respect. In fact, even the Q/A paradigm is bad because the average SO post requires scrolling past at least one extensive code example that does not work,

For more than 10 years I thought the world needed a search engine for programmers. You really ought to be able to upload your POM file or equivalent and have the system automatically search the correct version of documentations. (Any attempt to look up things in the Java manual has to be written like “JDK17 javadoc {className}”; Javascript libraries like reactstrap, react-router and such often have a few wildly incompatible versions and I don’t want to waste a millisecond with the wrong version doc, …)

I wouldn’t mind searching answers from stackoverflow but I only want the best correct answer and I don’t want to read a long confused question, etc. As this would clearly save coders time maybe they’d pay for a subscription as they do for Jetbrains tools.