Just wanted to add that Atwood's claim that SO is not for beginners is utter tosh (presumably he'd love it to be just frequented by the creme de la creme of programmers).
Advanced programming topics are complicated and nuanced and require a lot of space to discuss (like we have available here for instance), mostly the answer is "it depends" and the answers certainly can't be copied and pasted.
Stack Overflow on the other hand is copy and paste central. It's where I go (via google) if I can't remember the syntax for something, or if I want to know what API options are available to me. It has a lot of dreadful code that works, but will get you in a mess later if you're not careful.
If there is vitriol there, I don't believe it's because it's full of experts, quite the reverse. Expert developers are too busy developing working features and enjoying their jobs. SO probably has slightly more than its fair share of insecure *sshole developers who love to dump on people who don't know something they know (along with others who genuinely want to help). But let's not given them all credit for being experts, there is no way I'd hire an *sshole developer like that for my team, no matter what framework they learnt last month - people like that are a total liability.
Great community you have here by the way, I'm enjoying it very much!
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Just wanted to add that Atwood's claim that SO is not for beginners is utter tosh (presumably he'd love it to be just frequented by the creme de la creme of programmers).
Advanced programming topics are complicated and nuanced and require a lot of space to discuss (like we have available here for instance), mostly the answer is "it depends" and the answers certainly can't be copied and pasted.
Stack Overflow on the other hand is copy and paste central. It's where I go (via google) if I can't remember the syntax for something, or if I want to know what API options are available to me. It has a lot of dreadful code that works, but will get you in a mess later if you're not careful.
If there is vitriol there, I don't believe it's because it's full of experts, quite the reverse. Expert developers are too busy developing working features and enjoying their jobs. SO probably has slightly more than its fair share of insecure *sshole developers who love to dump on people who don't know something they know (along with others who genuinely want to help). But let's not given them all credit for being experts, there is no way I'd hire an *sshole developer like that for my team, no matter what framework they learnt last month - people like that are a total liability.
Great community you have here by the way, I'm enjoying it very much!