

What's Wrong with Stack Overflow: Social Over Substance - JabavuAdams
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3736094/how-do-i-increment-add-one-to-or-decrement-subtract-one-from-a-number-in-com

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michael_dorfman
I don't get your complaint.

You posted a trivial question you knew the answer to, and then posted your
trivial solution, at which point you were told that it was preferred if people
asked genuine questions they didn't know the answer to.

If anything, people knocked you for not providing _enough_ substance-- and I
don't see anything "social" about the interaction at all.

There's a lot of things wrong with StackOverflow-- but you're not offering
much of a critique.

~~~
JabavuAdams
What's trivial to one is not trivial to all.

The reason I posted the question (and answer) is that I saw someone else was
confused about these operators in a different Stack Overflow question.

The "social" complaint was because the first commenter down-voted me because
he though I was trying to get a badge, not because he thought there was
something incorrect about the information (maybe he just didn't say so
explicitly).

A lot of people coming to Lisp are new, and need small little code snippets.

Although my answer may seem trivial, it had a few carefully-thought-out
properties: 1) A very specific title. 2) A specific answer, with alternatives,
and references to the language spec. Many Lisp newbs won't know to go to the
Hyperspec.

So, maybe I just posted this in the wrong place. What is the right place for
standard techniques or snippets that can improve the code-quality of a cut-
and-paste beginner?

~~~
michael_dorfman
_The reason I posted the question (and answer) is that I saw someone else was
confused about these operators in a different Stack Overflow question._

Then _that_ was the right place to post your answer.

It's generally considered a good idea to lurk a little while in an online
community, to see the local standards. If you had done so, you'd have seen
that people don't post "standard techinques or code snippets" to
StackOverflow-- they ask questions they don't know the answer to, and try to
answer other's questions.

If you want to help folks on SO with Lisp, you can try to answer some of the
genuine questions that have been asked.

~~~
JabavuAdams
_It's generally considered a good idea to lurk a little while in an online
community, to see the local standards._

True. I _did_ check the FAQ, at least, and concluded that this was a
legitimate post.

I think there's an unanswered need, here. It's a problem of search. You want
the first search result in google to be a small, rock-solid code snippet.

Small, because small is simple, and small can be perfect. Longer code samples
introduce too many degrees of freedom. Small samples can be unambiguously
correct (for a specific purpose). This doesn't mean they're trivial.

Anyhoo. If this isn't what Stack Overflow is, someone should make it...

------
slantyyz
Reminds me of that saying "no good deed goes unpunished".

As a user of SO, I always prefer to see an answer already there than asking
it. Even though SO users are super fast at answering my questions (usually get
answers < 1h), there is something to be said about the answer already being
there.

Having said that, the "hive" at SO has already developed a set of informal
rules, and there are plenty of people who seem to make a point of making meta-
commentary on questions.

While this is standard fare for social sites and the interwebs in general, at
least the signal to noise ratio is an order of magnitude better than most
other social sites.

------
rada
I don't get it. Given your self-proclaimed skillset (below) you are trying to
tell us you genuinely don't know how to increment a number in Lisp?

    
    
        Expertise:
    
        Computer, Video, and Mobile Games (PC/Mac/Consoles/iPhone/Android)
        Real-time physics simulation
        Game-logic and character AI
        3DS Max scripts and plug-ins
        Unity game engine
        OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Cg Shaders
        C/C++/Objective-C/Java/Python/Lua/Common Lisp

~~~
JabavuAdams
You're right, I knew the answer. I wanted to create a canonical answer that
others could find, since I could not find one, and since I have evidence that
some other programmers don't know this.

~~~
slmbrhrt
So why not let them ask the question themselves? I understand that's part of
the premise of StackOverflow.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Chicken-and-egg. As a senior dev. I often see junior devs who don't know what
questions to ask. They do a quick google search, and if it doesn't come up in
the first few hits, they're lost.

------
gojomo
Not only is it OK to answer your own question on SO, there's a badge you can
only get by doing so: "Self-Learner: Answered your own question with score of
3 or more."

Here's the tip I shared to get my Self-Learner badge:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1107551/css-
strikethrough...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1107551/css-
strikethrough-different-color-from-text/1107556#1107556)

