
Is there a good place to casually discuss programming-related questions? - endur
StackOverflow is about solving people&#x27;s problems. Is there a place with less strict rules? Where do you go to ask more open-ended questions?
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randomdrake
IRC. Many projects have something on Freenode[1] in some capacity.
Additionally, there are programming channels for lots of specializations. Some
channels have rules, but they are mostly about civilized conversation and RTFM
kinds of things.

[1] - [https://freenode.net](https://freenode.net)

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kazinator
StackExchange itself has one such as site: programmers.stackexchange.com.
That's about programming-related questions different from StackOverflow.

There is also CS StackeExchange for those open-ended questions that are in the
area of theory.

Personally, I recommend good old Usenet. comp.programming newsgroup and
others.

~~~
manojlds
Is this answer being down voted? Programmers SE is a good suggestion, and
allows more open ended questions.

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pmiller2
[https://reddit.com/r/learnprogramming](https://reddit.com/r/learnprogramming)
maybe?

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emilong
Can you give an example of the kind of question or discussion you're looking
for? Might help folks narrow down their answer.

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quincyla
Free Code Camp's forums exist specifically for discussing programming-related
questions - literally anything related to programming, open source, or getting
a developer job:
[http://forum.freecodecamp.com](http://forum.freecodecamp.com)

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charlesism
As far as I know, the internet lacks an adequate solution for this. If it
existed, it would have enough users that we would all already know about it.

Instead there's just a fragmented bunch of relatively small forums, group
chats, mailing lists, etc.

~~~
kazinator
The Internet solved this very nicely more than thirty years ago with a
protocol called NNTP connecting article servers to form a network called
Usenet.

The traffic is pretty low on Usenet these days. You can blame your
aforementioned fragmentation for that. People would rather write to walled
gardens. The idea of using special client to connect a server is somewhat
alien to the generation that equates the Internet with the Web. There is also
a learning curve to Usenet. For instance, newbies will be dismayed by a long
delay while the client downloads the the entire list of newsgroups when
connecting for the first time. This is something you can turn off. E.g. in the
SLRN newsreader's .slrnrc file:

    
    
      set read_active 0       % don't download active file
      set check_new_groups 0  % don't bother me with new groups
    

I'm currently subscribe to these:

    
    
      comp.compilers
      comp.lang.awk
      comp.lang.lisp
      comp.programming
      comp.programming.threads
      comp.std.c
      comp.terminals
      comp.theory
      comp.unix.admin
      comp.unix.programmer
      comp.unix.shell
      sci.electronics.basics
      sci.electronics.design
      sci.electronics.repair

~~~
speeder
When I tried to poke around, what I found is lots of expensive clients and no
obvious gratuitous alternative, except for some time, Google groups

~~~
mirimir
I believe that just about all newsgroups, except the binary ones, are
available via Google Groups. Many years ago, Google bought archives going back
to more or less the beginning.

Thunderbird is an OK news client.

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sebringj
[http://chat.stackoverflow.com/](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/)

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justifier
linuxquestions.org

[http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/)

you can ask whatever questions you want, and even ask a half formed question
and eventually work out an answer through a back and forth

the community is great, and will happily help with the whole spectrum of
questions from broad discussions to very specific individual software issues

i found offering an opinion in other peoples' questions to be as equally
rewarding as asking my own

i linked to the programming forum above, but they have a bunch of great
forums.. check out some of the other ones where you might have, or want to
have, an overlap in interest:

[http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/)

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boot13
CodeNewbie Slack community.
[http://www.codenewbie.org/](http://www.codenewbie.org/).

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syngrog66
Reddit

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vitaut
A pub

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ed1ted
Quora

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winteriscoming
[http://javaranch.com/](http://javaranch.com/) which is primarily a Java
focused site but they have been re-branding it as
[http://coderanch.com/](http://coderanch.com/) for a while now to bring in
discussions for various other programming languages and
programming/engineering in general
[http://www.coderanch.com/t/660249/Wiki/Code-Ranch-
Domain](http://www.coderanch.com/t/660249/Wiki/Code-Ranch-Domain).

They have been around for a while now
[http://www.javaranch.com/JRhistory.jsp](http://www.javaranch.com/JRhistory.jsp)

~~~
winteriscoming
They do have a couple of rules there - 1. Be Nice 2. They strictly enforce
their naming policy wherein they expect users to have a real _sounding_
display name.

