[shagie]

Do you have any examples of such questions asked in the past... let’s say four years?

The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them.

The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to curate them.

Anyways, https://www.slant.co is set up to do recommendations better than stack overflow could conceivably do. Not all questions are best asked on stack overflow.

[payne92]

Examples of questions about the existence of API and library functionality in the past four years? (with recommendation answers) Sure:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-...

... etc ...

I get the idea of avoiding "what's the best programming language?"-type questions, but to the point of my original comment, the application of the policy feels very uneven and therefore "oddly subjective".

[shagie]

The application of the policy depends on people with moderation abilities seeing it. The first link for example has only been seen about 50 times a month for the past 5 months.

The Skype question is a bit older Its actually 6 years older and has only been seen on average 100 times a month. The answer is "yes, look at [broken link], and [obsolete python library at source forge]". It needs some curation. Are you up to doing it? The other answer says that the answer was action in 2011... and compares it to using IE5.

The fourth link (python mixed integer linear programming) is interesting in that its three and a half years old, has only one answer and has been updated in the past 5 days. The author of that answer has done almost 20 revisions keeping it up to date since then. This is the work that needs to be done on posts to keep it useful and relevant.

Compare with the second answer to Elasticsearch HTTP API or python API:

> You may also try elasticsearch_dsl it is a high level wraper of elasticsearch.

Thats it. A lot more work is going to need to be done to that post to make it useful. That said, this isn't a "does this exist" question its a "Which technique is better for my occasion? The elasticsearch RESTful API or the python API for elastic search (elasticsearch-py)?"

The Fast bipartite matching actually matches that criteria.

The point I'm trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to keep the good questions of this sort good and useful. Otherwise, they end up like the Skype question and become worse than useless in that they make it harder to find the answer on other sources.