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Discussion on: How's your relationship with StackOverflow?

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mistval profile image
Randall

I answer questions on it sometimes. I ask questions extremely rarely, but it has helped me on occasion.

It's rare for me to run into a problem/question that I can't figure out via looking at documentation and/or experimentation. And I'm not special, I think that's true for everyone.

But it does seem like there are a lot of people who become dependent on StackOverflow and I think they're doing a disservice to themselves. 95% of questions on StackOverflow are just horrible. Unclear, no effort, just people wanting to be spoonfed code. I fear most people asking questions on StackOverflow will never become good programmers, because they run to StackOverflow the second they run into any problem, and just copy paste the code that they get spoonfed.

Struggling with something yourself for 10 hours will teach you more than StackOverflow ever will. I think programmers should consider StackOverflow a last resort.

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hnrq profile image
Henrique Ramos • Edited

It's like watching a game stage walkthrough instead of trying to pass by yourself, haha