
Ask HN: Why is there no real programming community? - thosakwe
Note: Here, when I say &quot;community,&quot; I really mean &quot;online community.&quot;<p>To me, the most puzzling thing about programming is that there is no real place to actually <i>discuss</i> programming.<p>As weird&#x2F;absurd as that sounds, it seems like three major avenues where most discussion occurs are:<p>1. Reddit. Subreddits are nice and very effectively organize discussion of different topics. On the other hand, Reddit is virtually anonymous, and it&#x27;s generally frowned upon to share anything of your own creation, in order to not be flagged as spam&#x2F;self-promotion.<p>2. Hacker News. It&#x27;s more than acceptable to submit your own content, or other people&#x27;s content you found interesting. The downside is that it&#x27;s very difficult to get to the frontpage, and most posts not on the frontpage are forgotten. There&#x27;s also the fact that this site is far more anonymous than Reddit, and that features like downvoting are blocked off for most users.<p>3. Twitter. I like Twitter because it&#x27;s very personal, and you can actually put faces to names (unheard of elsewhere). The downside here is that for anyone to hear anything you&#x27;re saying, you truly have to have tens of thousands of followers. I have 4,000, but most of those people are not programmers, and thus there&#x27;s less than a smidgeon of opportunity for any sort of programming discussion there.<p>So, I&#x27;ve always wondered.<p>Is the reason that there is no real online community, the fact that maybe we just don&#x27;t need one?<p>Thoughts? Just wanted to discuss...
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MaulingMonkey
> To me, the most puzzling thing about programming is that there is no real
> place to actually discuss programming.

There totally are. Forums, chatrooms, mailing lists - they tend to be more
niche than simply "programming", because that's simply such a huge topic...
you can find better, if more niche, common ground. You don't have "the
drinking" community - you have coffee lovers, the wine testers, microbrewers,
etc.

I spent long enough on gamedev.net and it's associated chat channels (first
IRC, now Discord too) for my relationships with people online to bleed out
into the real world. It taught me a ton about programming. It got me my first
industry job offer, from someone who I helped teach. In passing, I've seen
various FOSS communities, programming languages, etc. - often focused strictly
on shop talk, but not always.

There's a lot of pseudonymity to be sure, and you'll get pushback if the first
thing out of your mouth is "hey check out my game/project/community, email me
because I'm not sticking around long enough to hear any feedback here" \-
which happens surprisingly often - but there's plenty people can share
relating to their projects, the tech they're using, or having trouble with, or
finding new and interesting ways to (ab)use - even from the get go, that can
be well received.

It's the difference between finding a topic of shared interest to discuss, vs
broadcasting a topic of just _your_ interest to talk at people with. The
latter isn't a discussion.

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fallingfrog
People use the word community in such false ways. I've heard phrases like "the
pancake eating community" and so on. People who eat pancakes aren't a
community. Your community consists of the people who will let you stay at
their house if yours floods. Or the people who will come and get you if your
car breaks down. That's a community.

~~~
zerostar07
> if yours floods

Increasingly in the west local communities are weakened, and these tasks are
taken up by government services. That's why online communities thrive: they
allow people who are dispersed all over the place to coordinate.

------
RossBencina
Once you get to the scale of "all programming" perhaps there is not so much
shared culture or knowledge to bind a single community together. This might be
related to the way communities of practice organise at different scales,
rather than something specific about programming. (Compare: Why is there no
real on-line piano-playing community?)

A related question is: why are developer communities balkanized by programming
language, application domain, programming paradigm, educational background? In
part this is tribalism. Often corporations take advantage of this tendency to
gain market advantage, which amplifies the effect.

Finally, why should there be a single, unified, online community? There are
_many_ online communities of programmers and that seems to be working pretty
well.

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mromanuk
I see programmers discussing all over, for example in Github Issues, or
Stackoverflow. Always topic based discussions, obviously. They lack the social
interaction and freedom to think more broadly about programming and solutions,
though. Is that what you are talking about? Edit: grammar

~~~
HankB99
Github is pretty diffuse to count much as a community, though there are
aspects of community about it.

Stackoverflow and kin are very focused on specific questions and are elitist.
I've participated for years and find that I cannot add my comments because I
don't have sufficient points. And DO NOT post a stupid question or someone
will suggest you delete it. (I'm of the opinion that there are no stupid
questions but I do see the occasional stupid answer.)

The communities I see are a bit more general than programming. A good example
is the Raspberry Pi community. Many of their discussions involve programming
but more generally are "how do I do XXX." That community is also fostered by
the folks who bring us the RPi.

Some of the more recent languages like Rust and Go seem to be fostering too.

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vinayms
I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you
can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the
topic, or repeat what others might have said 10 pages back? There are many
phpboard like forums dedicated for games, linux etc which are of this nature.

For a more controlled kind of discussions, the current preeminent site for
such activity is stackexchange. Sure, it has its flaws - its strictly qna
style, is filled with elitist and intolerant mods - but for most questions
that are not of the form "how to do X with API Y on platform Z", you will find
discussion in comments. Even on stackoverflow which primarily encourages
questions of the above form, there are enough discussions. The
softwareenginering site is much better for slightly opinionated discussions
disguised as questions and answers; so are workplace, unix etc.

------
elviejo
What is your opinion about: Lambda the Ultimate [http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/)

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budadre75
Stackoverflow? It's a real place to discuss programming. Discussions spans
across years, and not limited to solving a particular technical problem, there
are questions about general concept clarifications. Plus there are also github
repos where relevant code is discussed directly.

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CyberFonic
On the contrary, there are lots of different programming communities. They
represent different areas of interest, levels of knowledge, experience.

I cannot see how we could have a "single community" that is equally relevant
to CS researchers and newbie programmers and all the other variations in
between.

To take your example of "discussing programming", Lambda the Ultimate comes to
mind. But even there how could reconcile the "conversations" of JavaScript
hackers and Haskell gurus?

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tiensonqin
Hidifferent.com is a website to share knowledge and learn about different
cultures. I'm still working on it, :)

I've created some programming communities, for example:
[https://hidifferent.com/clojure](https://hidifferent.com/clojure)
[https://hidifferent.com/rust](https://hidifferent.com/rust)
[https://hidifferent.com/ocaml](https://hidifferent.com/ocaml)

It supports sub channels and anyone can create public or invite-only
communities.

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speedplane
The most comprehensive discussion community has got to be Github. Real people
commenting on real issues that crop up in specific software problems.

Probably the second largest community Stack Overflow. Real people commenting
on real issues that crop up general programming problems.

Twitter is mostly bots or journalists talking about speculative technology
problems that rarely crop in practical programming careers (no, I don't need
240 character advice on how to shut down skynet).

------
segmondy
There is. IRC and it has been around for decades. Freenet.

~~~
thosakwe
I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically small
and hard-to-discover.

There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into "please
do my homework." At least, in my experience.

I could be wrong, though.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> I could argue against IRC (and other chat rooms) that they're typically
> small and hard-to-discover.

Size varies. I'm idling in Mozilla's #rust and that has 1390 people in it
alone. And small communities are still communities, I'd argue as well!

> There's also the fact that programming chat rooms quickly devolve into
> "please do my homework." At least, in my experience.

There will always be (attempted) freeloaders in any community. How they're
handled varies - I've been in several with explicit no-homework policies,
where the community _will_ give you grief if you didn't even try to google,
strongly steering people towards developing their ability to help themselves
rather than relying on handouts. "Teach a man to fish" etc.

Which isn't to say people won't still try, but it can be managed and policed.

Even there, people will generally help out when someone encounters a totally
strange/niche/not easily understood or explained edge case, if only to better
understand it for themselves, or to spend a minute to save another person
hours. But that's a win/win as far as I'm concerned - not much of a community
IMO if you're not willing to do that!

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mabynogy
There is one at least now and it's on IRC!

[http://dailyprog.org/chat/](http://dailyprog.org/chat/)

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Bjartr
What is a community for a different topic comparable to what you would
like/expect to exist for programming?

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OJFord
What would you like to discuss in such a forum?

I suspect the answer is that if many (enough) others do too, it does already
exist.

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sloaken
Because programming, although a subset of IT, is very broad. There are a lot
of communities, not just a single one. I personnaly LOVE stackoverflow, Joel
is my HERO, but it is more of a question and answer forum. CodeProject is more
of a community, and might fit your needs.

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sam0x17
There are communities just like what you describe on Gitter in the rooms for
particular programming languages

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NVRM
Yep, let forums comes back. They died mostly because phpBB was an absolute
mess.

~~~
krapp
>They died mostly because phpBB was an absolute mess

They died mostly because Reddit and Facebook made them obsolete.

They won't come back at least until people stop losing their heads over GDPR
compliance, although maybe self-hosted forums will come back with a general
push towards strong anonymity.

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yedawg
If you can't find a service that provides what you are referring to, build
something new. Create a 4chan for programming or something terrible and work
really hard on it til you are proud of it.

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Arcaelyx
There's the functional programming Discord server here with a few thousand
users: [https://discord.me/fp](https://discord.me/fp)

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yesenadam
Good question. I think you mean "Why is there no online programming discussion
forum"?

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thepra
No one is mentioning DevRant...

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amingilani
Mastodon.technology has a super nerdy and fun community. I highly recommend
it!

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krrw
There's StackOverflow for you.

