Should we create a community for programming help?
Should we create a community for programming help?
I used to be a lurker of r/C_programming where people would ask questions and get answers. It mostly consisted of students wanting to get a human answer to their problem.
I liked chiming in there and answering from time to time. Although you always had that one student who ordered to do the homework for them, there were some nice and helpful interactions in that subreddit.
Would people be interested in a community focused around helping each others in programming? Or would this very community do the job already?
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We probably don't have enough user traffic to give people the specific help they need. Certainly not compared to something like StackOverflow, which is already what you're describing.
The issues with generalised user-to-user programming help (esp re: StackOverflow) is that an increasing number of communities are doing this in closed-off areas like Slack and Discord, where their support is not indexed or searchable. Users running into the same problems are struggling to find each others' answers. Creating yet another community that's separated from the internet at large exacerbates this problem.
In StackOverflow, when a user asks a similar question to one that was already asked, most of the time the question gets closed with a link to the "original" question without being told why the question is similar or how the answers to the "original" question can help the author.
That might be OKish for us experienced developers. But for a total beginner, I find this approach to be unsuitable. Most programming beginners don't even know how to phrase their question because they are not sure what they are struggling with themselves. Most of their posts will be like "There is something wrong with my code but I can't figure out what it is". That would not have a place on StackOverflow ; the post would get downvoted to infinity and the beginner - who is just looking to learn - will most probably say "Ok, StackOverflow no more" and move to other media for help.
One time I asked a question about Perl semantics ; I could not figure out the behavior of a program I wrote. My answer got closed and redirected to another question that did feature a similar program to mine, with a similar behavior. But the answer to that question was not it. It was not explaining the wrong behavior on my program ; although it was similar. At the end of the day I did manage to figure out what was happening ; it turns out it was an effect different from the post that was linked. I tried to make an Edit and asked for reopening my question in order to provide the real answer to that question but I think that did not get accepted.
Actually, now I cannot even find the question in my profile anymore. It probably got removed altogether.
I agree that the multitude of programming help communities is a problem and my proposition would exacerbate that. But StackOverflow is clearly not the answer for me.