[iherbig]

I think you may have misunderstood me if you boiled down my point to an existential question.

My point was that directing to Google or documentation is a basic misunderstanding (or simple forgetfulness) of what it means to be a beginner in the field. It is that telling someone to "Google it" or "read the docs" fails to understand the fact that beginners often simply can't comprehend documentation and can't use Google effectively because they do not have the foundation necessary to understand the problem they are facing.

This isn't an existential question of "what is a programmer." It's the statement that if SO is exclusive to "beginners" then it is doing the field a disservice. And it's a statement that directing beginners to Google or documentation is elitist and inherently exclusionary in practice.

[Latty]

I think that the people behind SO have weighed up the pros and cons - a million questions about the most basic parts of a language are not that helpful to anyone but the person asking, and are better answered in the context of a tutorial or whatever. Generally those kinds of super-beginner questions are not useful without context, so they get either a useless answer or a small tutorial that doesn't really work because it's on SO.

Expecting people to be able to learn a language from nothing by going on SO and asking questions just isn't going to work well. It'll burn out answerers and fill the site with mostly useless content. I respect the decision made by the SO guys to focus the site and avoid that, because a useful resource for one group is better than a bad resource for everyone.