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by OkayPhysicist 1277 days ago
The Q&A format of Stack Overflow isn't really built for complex questions. It works really well for being an easily searched repository of short, technical solutions to well-bounded technical problems.

The Elixir community talked about this a lot on the forums back when I was active on there, because language rankings look at Stack Overflow questions and Stack Overflow questions proliferate in languages with footguns. "Don't use obviously_named_function(), use obscr_wrd_fcn() instead" fits the SO formula quite well. Well designed languages, Elixir included, don't produce many of those kinds of question/answers. That leaves significantly more room for discourse around architecture and other higher-level conceptual stuff, which doesn't really have one correct answer, and thus is ill-suited for SO, being relegated to the lower-discoverability forums (and worse, the un-discoverable Discord).