Would it be better to redirect all new Julia usage questions to Stack Overflow?

yes and your contributions are much appreciated, both here and on SO: I have so many times benefited from your answers Matt! :+1:

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Yeah, I’ve been told by a handful of people that I’m … unique … in my tolerance for getting raked across the coals on SO. But I think I mentioned earlier, I view it pretty impersonally. Putting a question up there that follow the site guidelines and are on topic takes some practice, and it’s not much different than figuring out the syntax for a piece of programming. Grumpy mods on the other side of the screen vetoing me aren’t too much worse than all the red error text I see most of the day anyway :upside_down_face:

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:rofl:

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Sure, but it also takes some effort to craft a question, which does not go to zero even with a lot of practice.

I dislike SO because the expected payoff / effort ratio is so low. For nontrivial questions, what often happens is that people cannot give a definite answer, but nevertheless can provide helpful suggestions or clarifying questions (“why are you doing this?”) that point me in the right direction. It happens a lot here, but my impression is that the structure of SO discourages replies like that, so no one replies.

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On SO, you can have such discussions in the comments underneath question and answer posts. This way, the question can crystallize a bit to help those who come across it later. I think this feature does a good job of enabling helpful discussion while making the content future readers are concerned with bubble to the top.

Commenting is a privilege that requires 50 points, which isn’t too tough to achieve.

The real payoff to composing a well-crafted question and answer, besides getting an answer to your question, is that you’re writing supplemental documentation that will help the community. It’s genuinely an open source contribution. :slightly_smiling_face:

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For an actionable suggestion, here’s a blurb to append to the Usage tag description.


Usage

Questions and discussion about using Julia. If you are new to Julia or have questions regarding your first program please use the First Steps subcategory and for performance related questions use the Performance subcategory.
If your goal is to have an informal discussion with other Julia users and get a quality answer quickly, this is the right place! If you would like to compose a question optimally suited to help those who might have the same question in the future, consider posting on Stack Overflow with the [julia] tag.


I think something along these lines would serve as a solution to the question I posed initially.

I don’t think we should direct people with questions to an often-hostile place like Stack Overflow or otherwise discourage them from asking here in any way.

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Agreed. In many ways it’s better if we strive hard to make this the welcoming place for everything Julia and leave stack overflow for its audience whoever they are. If they don’t include many Julia people, then hey this is the place to ask julia questions. And if they do contain many julia people then people can already go over there. I just don’t see what benefit the Julia community would gain by discouraging participation here in any way.

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If anything maybe we should do the opposite, and send people here rather then to SO. Like @dlakelan mentioned lets have this be THE place to be for questions and answers related to Julia. Then it wont just be an answer, it will grow the community, it will give people resources they can use in the future and might simultaneously make them feel welcomed and motivate them to stay here and participate.

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related / half off:

" JUNE 23, 2021

Announcing the launch of Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

We’re thrilled to be launching this new product with Google Cloud and Go."

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That does seem interesting, but I can’t find any talk off what it would cost for an open source community?

This feature isn’t super relevant for us, given the distributed nature of the Julia Community. This is geared towards corporations with open source software (which one could argue Julia Computing falls under, but that’s a separate discussion).

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It was mentioned in this thread that I do a fair bit of Q/A like questions posts on Stack Overflow. Partially inspired by this thread, I am going to be doing a livestream later this week: Stack OverFlow-athon starting Wednesday June 30th, 7 AM CST

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