
Time Spent Waiting for an Answer in StackOverflow (by language) - Kopion
http://blog.guillermowinkler.com/blog/2012/10/30/how-long-waiting-for-an-answer-in-stackoverflow/
======
hasenj
There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty
much all questions would get answers within minutes. I was somewhat active on
it and to me it was like an RPG game of trying to get more and more points. It
was damn addictive.

Then, somehow it got boring and complicated, and I stopped playing. I don't
exactly remember what or how that happened, but it was a mixture of new rules
and confusing features.

I haven't played there for more than 2 years, but I'm still in the top 2%, and
best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I
stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points.

StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning.

I think a major factor is that simply, all the basic and interesting questions
already got asked. New questions these days tend to be very specific and
complicated.

~~~
forrestthewoods
"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning."

Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years
ago. Anytime I have any programming question I immediately google it and odds
of a StackOverflow answer are very high.

I started iOS dev when it was fairly new and it sucked. So many bugs, gotchas,
and misc shortcoming of the dev environment, Obj-C, or the SDK. Every single
issue I ran into has now been cleanly answered on SO. Things I wasted dozens
of hours on then would take me mere minutes as a new dev today.

I sympathize with it not being as fun to answer questions today, but I have no
idea how you can say it was more useful then than it is now.

~~~
hasenj
I meant useful for getting answers to new questions.

Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but
didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the
question to SO.

But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and
answers that it hosts.

~~~
joelthelion
Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a
patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question.

Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.

------
chmike
The quality of the service, in the point of view of help to solve a problem we
are encountering has significantly dropped. This is partly due to policy and
partly due to the much lower quality and pertinence of the answers.

Contributors are there to earn points and just try whatever answer comes to
their mind even if it's so vague or approximate that it is useless. Just
trying, nothing to loose.

I guess the experts went away from it because the initial thrill has gone
(sign of smartness) and they have better things to do then stare at a browser
to catch new questions for no other rewards then getting points.

My impression is that stackoverflow was initially in a virtuous circle and now
it's in a vicious circle.

I now have questions like how EXT4 files with holes impacts performance of an
mmap ? Should I force a prior full fill of the file with dd before mmap ? I'll
certainly get crap answers and I really don't know where to ask this to get a
valuable answer. So I'll end up doing a benchmark, which has probably already
been done many time or people knowing how EXT4 works could answer straight out
of the book.

~~~
Radim
This.

Asking a question typically leads to a handful of "shotgunned" answers. Yes,
they do come immediately -- but the real story is, they are templated ("I'll
fix it later, just lemme be the first to answer"), incomplete, and/or simply
wrong.

A dozen explanatory comments later, the SO gun slingers finally understand the
question and its implications. No, I really was NOT asking that. Neither that.
Yes, that condition I mentioned in the question IS important and you cannot
ignore it in your answer. You have an error there. That won't work.

And once that happens... silence falls.

~~~
chmike
Happened to me. And that person responding completely aside of the question
voted to get my question closed and erased its answer. I was asking for
axisting asynchronous signal slot library to avoid implementing mine. Another
guy proposed to use QT and another one to use boost's signal which is not
asynchronous. The later guy commented to the QT guy that boost was so much
lighter and faster. Boost signal is known to be the less performant, but
because its boost it must be the best. This guy also voted to close my
question once I said I don't want to depend on boost. The question was finally
closed and I implemented my self the signal slot lib with a perfect match to
my requirements.

------
doesnt_know
Strange that there is no Python there.

[Insert joke about Python being so intuitive and easy to use no one asks
questions about it].

~~~
skrebbel
It was kind of a relief for me - when frequenting HN, one might get the idea
that everybody and their dog uses Python for everything, religiously. It's
good that there's people out there who simply accidentally forget that it
exists.

~~~
insin
It's the tenth most used tag on Stack Overflow:
<http://stackoverflow.com/tags>

~~~
draegtun
From a visual quick scan of the tags here is a list of the top _languages_ :

    
    
         1  c#           371433
         2  java         317047
         3  php          295016
         4  javascript   279976
         5  c++          156107
         6  python       140451
         7  objective-C  107083
         8  c             74124
         9  ruby          57577
        10  vb.net        36981
        11  perl          22101
        12  dephi         17439
        13  scala         11745
        14  haskell        8696
        15  actionscript   6102
        16  groovy         4970
        17  clojure        4046
        ..  f#             4046

~~~
draegtun
Additional to above, 11 months ago I also recorded some SO stats:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3286348>

Using these figures the % growth in questions asked in the last 11 months
would be:

    
    
      java        76%
      php         76%
      javascript  85%
      c++         60%
      python      70%
      c#         716%
      ruby        67%
      perl        50%
      scala       76%
      clojure     77%
      lua         77%
    

Assuming I've made no calculation or recording errors then the 700%+ increase
on c# is quite amazing!

------
10098
> Hey, Haskell has pretty good answer times, at least considering its 33th
> position in the TIOBE Index.

I need to mention here that the Haskell community on Stack Overflow is
AWESOME, they are helpful qualified people giving insightful answers (btw, Don
Stewart is an active participant).

~~~
crntaylor
I'll second this. Just browsing the questions in the Haskell tag on SO is a
great way to learn the language. There's a really nice mix of practical
questions and theoretical, mind-expanding ones there.

------
tomerv
By filtering out answers that arrive after more than 5 hours, you're really
skewing the data, and in a very arbitrary way. Why not 4 hours, or 6? Note
that filtering also caused languages to change relative positions (e.g. PHP
climbed from 5th place to 1st).

~~~
zzleeper
Well he could always compute the median. Less robust to outliers. 100
questions answered in 1 minute, with one question answered in 1 day will give
you an avg of 15 minutes instead of the more representative 1 minute

------
HyprMusic
"You see there, PHP running at front with 68 minutes average accepted answer
time, either it’s too easy or there’re too many of them."

It's an average, the size of each data-set shouldn't really affect the
results. If there's too many PHP questions then answer times would likely be
slower. Seems just like an excuse to dig at PHP.

~~~
alanctgardner2
I think he means that duplicates might be causing a problem? PHP is very
approachable, and you probably get a lot of new users asking similar
questions, which would be handled quickly. I think this was his motivation in
creating the plot of 'hard' questions which took more than a day.

------
DaNmarner
No Python, I'm starting to think OP is a troll.

~~~
guilespi
You're absolutely right! these are the python times:

* less than 5 hours (easy) => 34 minutes avg * less than 24 hours (medium) => 100 minutes avg

~~~
DaNmarner
So Python is deliberately left out?

~~~
guilespi
No, just forgot about it, I like Python pretty much.

------
dbecker
One alternative to leaving out the questions that take a long time is to
calculate the average of log(minutes).

Harder to interpret, but it accounts for the questions with long delays
without letting those questions dominate the calculation.

~~~
subleq
This technique is actually equivalent to the geometric mean:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_mean#Relationship_wit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_mean#Relationship_with_arithmetic_mean_of_logarithms)

------
ck2
Could (My|Postgre)SQL be considered a language too? How about RegEx?

~~~
guilespi
I've created a query in the data browser, just select the tags you want:

[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-
long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language)

------
ck2
I think another aspect is SO has the same problem as HN.

Same thing posted will get a different response depending on the time of day
because of the signal:noise ratio.

------
fnl
this is flawed: the presence of an answer post does not mean that the author
actually got an answer...

~~~
mcantor
The author filtered on questions with accepted answers only.

------
nnq
tl;dr ..but ...where is Python?

~~~
chmike
I guess people use other channels to get help, or not much help is needed, or
there are few noobs working with python, ...

------
jpdoctor
Rails?

~~~
guilespi
Just change the tags in the set:

[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-
long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language)

~~~
jpdoctor
Hmmm. Seems like I'm an idiot:
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83835/how-...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83835/how-
long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language)

There's something I'm missing: Run query doesn't get me the result.

------
pootch
Actually they should mostly wait. The firehose of SO is largely filled with
stupidity, lazyness, and people too lazy to learn or google what they need.

SO has become the tit to feed the stupid calf, and the milk has run dry
because noone in their right mind should spend any time answering the
questions of lazy, good for nothing idiots who think they could program
someday, by merely posting every idiotic problem they encounter including
syntax errors to SO.

If that was SO's mission. Mission accomplished. I and any other person who
respects their own time and value will not spend 5 minutes on monkeys typing
shakespeare.

