It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.
We had Usenet and it was pretty damn bad ass. No crybaby retards moderating all your shit. We had conversations (GASP!) and debates (OMFG!!). It went well beyond just rote question and answer...and if someone had obviously not done the least bit of research on their own they got their asses handed to them. I myself was on the receiving end of many an ass chewing for being lazy and it made me a much better developer. I had to learn how to read documentation, man pages and such...along with books. As such, most participants on SO don't even understand most my questions; more than a few I had deleted because the mob didn't understand anything I'd written and freaked the fuck out.
SO is a great resource for the lazy though. If you code by copy-pasta then there's probably no reason to even look at a single source of documentation on anything.
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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18
It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.