

Scheme vs Common Lisp: war stories - gnosis
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/41045/scheme-vs-common-lisp-which-characteristics-made-a-difference-in-your-project

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dboat
Rather than close these sorts of "not constructive" but clearly useful
questions, it would be a lot better if they created a place for them.
Something like knowledge.stackexchange.com, where the utility of public
questions and upvoted answers could be applied to more subjective, as well as
more advanced topics.

They really limit their own usefulness by throwing out the baby with the
bathwater.

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tikhonj
I think the main problem is that the site format is _very_ focused on a single
sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers. This is
what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as
discussion sites.

Creating a good site for discussion would be quite a bit of work, paramount to
creating a different platform. I could perhaps see them expanding to that
style of site and reusing the StackExchange brand in the future, but it would
essentially be a separate sort of product. For now, it makes the most sense to
focus on what they're already great at: Q&A sites.

These sort of questions are much better suited to places like HN and Reddit,
although those also have their own problems. (Mostly, discussion tends to be
short-lived: almost nobody looks at HN comments a day after they've left the
front page, and Reddit isn't all that much better in that regard.)

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bunderbunder
_I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single
sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers._

That gets said a lot, but the truth of the matter is that it works just fine
for this kind of thing, too. Stellar case in point: The linked article. It
even has (or at least had) features which are specifically designed to support
this kind of scenario. Remember the Community Wiki feature?

The site is absolutely littered with great resources on topics which a small
number of the site's moderators have deemed too subjective to be of value but
which the site's users have upvoted into the stratosphere or provided
extremely useful, thoughtful answers which other users proceeded to upvote
into the stratosphere. Oftentimes they were around since near the site's
beginning, enough time to become top Google results which are often linked by
blogs, and generally done quite well for themselves - all a testament to how
excellent a job Stack Overflow's format does at producing _extremely_ high-
quality content on these topics. Only to get closed anyway within the past
year or two, in the service of trying to force this bizarre reality-deaf
Pronouncement from Above that, regardless of what anyone's actual experience
may be, you are mistaken and Stack Overflow can't actually do that.

In summary: If the people who run Stack Overflow were in charge of Apple,
there would be a ban on music/podcast player apps on the iPad justified by
nothing firmer than condescending lectures about how Steve Jobs prefers audio
players that fit in his pocket and has therefore pronounced that the iPad is
fundamentally unsuited to the consumption of audio content.

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Sandman
Mind you, this question wasn't even posted on SO. It was posted on
programmers.stackexchange.com which begs the question, on which stackexchange
site, if any, would this be a valid question?

~~~
bunderbunder
Heh. I'm old school; I think it all belongs on SO and P.SE should be merged
back into the mother site.

As far as I can tell, the only practical consequences of having them as two
separate sites are that you have to set up different user accounts to use
them, and the SE.com is less discoverable because search results depend on
what subsite you search on. Not exactly a great win for usability.

Having separate sites for completely separate topics (like most the others on
SE) makes all the sense in the world. But sticking a Berlin wall between the
categories of "programming questions" and "other programming questions" is
just goofy.

To my mind, the original once-sentence statement of how P.SE is different from
SO (Paraphrased, "SO is for when you're sitting at the keyboard, P.SE is for
when you're standing at the whiteboard.") makes it clear that the idea was
fuzzily-conceived from the get-go. And it only got more muddled when the
maintainers of the site, which had originally been specifically envisioned as
a place for subjective discussion as per the very first sentence of the
(original) site FAQ,* came out with a decision that it was absolutely not a
place for subjective discussion, no how no way.

*Those with long memories will catch me out by pointing out that the very next paragraph of the original FAQ started by making a sudden one hundred eighty degree turn and specifically admonishing people to not ask subjective questions. I must concede that this is absolutely true. But I would counter by saying this fact doesn't make P.SE look any more well-conceived.

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cpdean
Why are all the interesting questions on programmers.stackexchange.com are
closed for being "not constructive"?

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freework
Because the mods set up a bot that automatically closes questions that get
over X amount of upvotes.

Or at least thats what it seems...

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_sh
The accepted answer is an excellent post. In it is this gem:

 _> Scheme's syntax-case is far more subtle and complicated than any one thing
in Lisp._

While syntax-case seems complicated at first because it involves a similar
mind-bending to that first time when you learned about lambda, it is my number
one power tool that keeps me coming back to scheme (the other being a small
'surface area' that I can keep in my head without having to keep skipping
between library documentation and code).

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anonymous
And closed. Thank you for playing.

~~~
agentq
\-- closed 2011 Nov 28.

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lumberjack
Interesting nobody mentioned CLOS. From an outsider perspective of somebody
who only used R5RS Scheme, it seems like the one huge difference between
Scheme and CL variants.

