stackoverflow.com - what the online programming community needs ?
September 15th, 2008 at 7:26 pmI’ve long been claiming that what makes the Perl community so great is Perlmonks. “The monastery” is awesome not only because it houses the best Perl minds out there, but also because of how it is built. The reputation system it is based on serves as a honey-trap for narcissistic, semi-autistic programmers (that is, most of us) and makes it fun to read and browse.
Well, stackoverflow - the brain child of Joel Spolsky and Jeff Attwood audaciously attempts to conquer the whole programming community “the monastery way”. Reputation, “badges”, rep-based editing, rating and discussion are all there, packed in a beautiful web design that leaves Perlmonks 10 years behind in web technology. It appears that the amount of activity is already quite healthy.
I wonder what will become of stackoverflow. Will it suceed or go bust ? Is what works for a tightly knit single-language community suitable for the all the programming “web” ? Will people actually like browsing the website in the long run, or will the enthusiasm eventually fade away ? It is hard to say now, but I sure hope it suceeds. Because overall, it’s a pretty good idea.
P.S. They should really improve their search. I wonder if all the stackoverflow posts are indexed by Google (sure hope so).
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September 15th, 2008 at 22:05
They weren’t indexing them during Private Beta (understandable) and didn’t see if they intended to do it during the public beta or not, but at the very least once it is officially live it will be indexed definitely, that was one of their big goals is for super narrow programming questions’ top hit to be them on Google.
Having been in the private Beta I’m very optimistic for how it turns out and what it means for programmers, if the community plays nice and the site survives the traffic it could do very well.
September 15th, 2008 at 22:55
Well, it has the equivalent of PM’s “Seekers of Perl Wisdom”, but not “Cool Uses for Perl”, nor “Snippets”, “Categorized Q&A”, “Meditations”, “News” nor any of the other sections. Not quite a substitute yet.
September 16th, 2008 at 06:43
derek:
Yep, I’ll miss Meditations most. However, it seems achievable on stackoverflow, because people do post “questions” and discussions on broad topics, not very narrowly specific.