[wiremine]

Was just thinking what it was like to develop before Stack Overflow... and before github... Yikes!

Kudos to the team over at SO to continue to iterate the business.

I do wish they'd add an "out of date" button to flag questions/answers that are no longer relevant or just plain wrong. I think the amount of cruft they're going to deal with in the next 10 years is going to be HUGE.

[EliRivers]

I have to resort to SO a couple of times a month, so before SO (and other such) it was 95% the same as it is now.

I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A.

Maybe it's different for people who did start with SO available; perhaps they're saving their cognitive load by outsourcing various snippets of information to SO, and I only internalised them because SO wasn't available.

That said, it IS good for more open-ended historical or state-of-the-art type questions; "why did language X adopt this paradigm?" or "how do people producing commercial software go about supporting multiple graphics hardware today?" kind of questions. If I get lucky, there are a handful of people with a real depth of knowledge who can give a valuable overview and insight, but those are a long way from the typical SO question.

[matwood]

I find SO valuable for 'gotcha' types of questions. Update to the iOS9 sdk and now suddenly my build breaks with error-235132. Check SO and find out, yeah there is some flag that now needs to be YES instead of NO.

SO also lets me get by in frameworks and languages without having to know them all super deep. I find it much more useful to spend my cognitive load on algorithmic level or higher architectural level items instead of Spring configuration values or random iOS .plist keys.

[archagon]

Depends on what you're doing, I guess? I do a lot of UI development and I resort to SO almost daily to figure out the edge cases of all the APIs and frameworks.

[freditup]

This would be a nice change. It's frustrating when your own questions are marked as duplicates because there's a similar question from five years ago.

[seanp2k2]

For me, it was a lot of forums, mailing lists, and Planet Source Code.

[vezzy-fnord]

To this day, mailing lists remain the authoritative sources for technical problems beyond the cursory.

[harakiri]

I found mailing lists to be the most annoying, prehistoric and bizarre way of getting help for anything other than dying...

[Amorymeltzer]

They can be useful. About six or seven years ago I subscribed to a few perl ones, then I created a rule in Gmail to tag them all with a label and skip the inbox. Never heard from them again.

Now, though, if I have a perl question, my first step is just searching my email. After years of aggregating, it's got some solid answers.

[yitchelle]

For me, it was the usenet, and specifically comp.lang.c and comp.arch.embedded. It was quite entertaining and useful, but that was way before it become Google groups and the spammer bots discovering it.

[tetraodonpuffer]

before SO/github there was usenet and good quality books, but then again we didn't have a new framework to learn every day, personally once I bought my O'Reilly X/Motif series I was set for quite some time!

[RubyPinch]

stackoverflow is also part-wiki, so depreciating questions isn't as likely as someone coming around and updating the answers

[wiremine]

> so depreciating questions isn't as likely as someone coming around and updating the answers

True, but I think it would be helpful for two reasons:

a. Someone looking for an answer might not realize it is out of date.

b. It would help surface questions that do need updating. You statement presupposes someone actually finds the out of date info. A button would help SO bring all those items to a single location.

[slg]

>It would help surface questions that do need updating.

This is the biggest issue with out of date answers. No one is browsing old questions when they already know the answer. They are browsing because they have the same problem and they got there through search. The user can leave a comment in that question but that won't really bring any attention to the issue. This can lead to the question being asked again and then quickly closed because it is a duplicate of the question with the outdated answer. That serves to worsens mod/user relationships regarding duplicates that has already been brought up in this thread.

[grdvnl]

Actually, I think a search engine's capability directly adds value to SO. Even, before SO, there were different forums and searching (Google and before that alta vista) could help you find at least a few answers, though not as comprehensive as SO in some respects.