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Stack Overflow and the Zeitgeist of Computer Programming (priceonomics.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stack Overflow remains one of the most widely-used resources in the developer community. Around 400,000 questions are posted there every month. The Priceonomics blog is using statistical analysis to ask, "What does the nature of these questions tell us about the state of programming?" They see tremendous growth in questions about Android Studio, as well as more generic growth in work relating to data analysis and cloud services. Topics on a significant decline include Silverlight, Joomla, Clojure, and Flash (not to mention emacs, for some reason). The article also takes a brief look at the site's megausers, who receive a lot of credit for keeping the signal-to-noise ratio as high as it is, while also taking flack for how the Stack Overflow culture has progressed. "Others are worried about how Stack Overflow has impacted programming fundamentals. Some critics believe that rather than truly struggling with a problem, developers can now just ask Stack Overflow users to solve it for them. The questioner may receive and use an answer with code they do not truly understand; they just know it fixes their problem. This can lead to issues in the long run when adjustments are needed."
The best-rated answers aren't always the most effective or maintainable, but they do tend to be the ones that look neatest at first sight, and almost invariably are written by someone already with a high score.
When I was a junior developer, I used to think that this this sort of thing demonstrated the hypothesis about most programmers being mediocre with a few stars. Now I learn that's it's just a small subset of people have a lot of time to spend answering cookie-cutter questions and know how to express confidence in their solution, and you get the Wikipedia effect where one bad answer has been given and suddenly everyone else is repeating it as gospel - not realising that it's because they all got the bad answer from Wikipedia/Stackoverflow/whatever peer-to-peer collaboration site is relevant to the field.
"Others are worried about how Stack Overflow has impacted programming fundamentals. Some critics believe that rather than truly struggling with a problem, developers can now just ask Stack Overflow users to solve it for them"
It's pretty rare that someone will discover on their own a better solution then a more experienced developer. I have learned quite a lot looking at other's solutions to a problem... in particular where the tool is not the best for the job.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I find it more interesting that some questioners will twist themselves into a pretzel to hide the fact that they want someone else to provide the answer to their homework problem.
I caught one of these miscreants by posting a solution with a non-obvious bug for a course in which I was a TA. When it came time to grade the assignments low and behold the verbatim answer appeared in no less than 100 students. Despite the warning posted on StackOverflow saying the code should be tested before use. None of the one hundred bothered running the code. Lazy bastards.
Yesterday there was a post titled "The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away ".
Someone raised a good point that the problem was more economics than technology.
Employers, with no clue about technology, "employing monkeys and paying them peanuts" to produce something that looks visually ok but hacked into existance underneath.
We, programers, work in an unregulated profession which keeps it dynamic, fast paced and forever evolving.
Regulation = stagnation
So, yes, there's a lot of crap code out there and it won't go away - live with it.
Without Stackoverflow years of man hours would be wasted struggling to figure out some problem that has already been solved by someone else.
Wasn't that the idea behind the free software movement, not having to re-invent the wheel each time?
What about re-debugging, re-attaching, the wheel each time?
If the strength of our profession is in the fluidity, speed of adaptation and evolution then something like Stackoverflow is essential.
If you really need the accreditation of a regulated profession then ask an interviewee for their Stackoverflow account to see what questions they've ask and answered.
Stackoverflow is the best thing that's happened to our profession that I can remember in my 25 years as a programer.