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by warty 2972 days ago
> Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.

You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.

It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.

I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.

If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...

1 comments

This removes a great deal of utility from the site. The majority of value in the site is not answering one individuals question at a time. Every single time I ask the search engine a programming question SO pops up as the first result. Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.
> Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.