[bluecalm]

I disagree about "not good for anybody". Reading opinions of experts even on topics like" PHP or Ruby" could be very educational. It's a way of sharing experience. If you face decisions about which technology to choose you want to soak that. Asking specific questions is not enough - the thing about experience is that people who have it encountered problems you often can't think of at the beginning of the way. What's the problem with adding "subjective" tag and allow filtering so people who don't want to see opinion based discussion won't ever encounter it while allowing others to enjoy it and learn from it ?

I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community. I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success. Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?

I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.

For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most... Is great read for someone starting with VIM,it got people excited, many upvoted and many participated. Do you really think closing it contribute to quality of the site ? Another example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c So many posts like the most upvoted answer in first and OP in 2nd (after edits) weren't written because of your policy. It's just sad :(