I read Joel Spolskys blog. He wrote about a site he and Jeff Attwood started a while back, a programing Q&A site. After much consideration (2 minutes :)) I decided to give it a try. I mean the idea is pretty cool and smart. Since Joels background is mostly in Windows, I was a little worried that I won't find any topics I'm interrested in, like Linux programing, open source C/C++ libraries, etc.To my surprise, I found out that there are other kind of questions. Questions about C/C++ in general, Linux programing, shell scripts, etc. Some of the questions were very interresting. These questions then got voted up (this is how I found them in the first place). The good answers were voted up, so I found the answer. I checked the correctness, then I was compelled to vote it up.
One problem though: you got to have some reputation to vote. It's logical: you have to prove that you know stuff or you can ask good questions. Yay!
So I answered a few of the Linux/Bash/C/C++/etc. related questions. I had my doubts that my answers were usefull, but soon people voted on my answers, and I got the required ammount of rep to vote. But just up. You have to prove some more to criticize other people.
Also, later on I asked some question about the Linux kernel (about the likely/unlikely macros). Soon I got answers, really good and helpfull answers. This got me thinking. Nobody would give me such detailed replies on another forums.
Or if they do, I would have to read through pages and pages of crap. Flame about how Linux is good/bad, is likely/unlikely necessary, etc. And the nth answer would propably be helpfull, like an RTFM with a link thats stale or shows an answer that was good on 2.4.x or 2.2.x kernels (but not in this case :)).
So what makes people answer these questions in detail? In their own time? Are they karma-whoring? Are they that nice? I don't know. If somebody knows the answer, please post it in the comments. Thanks.
And now for some criticism.
Subjective questions that get a lot of votes. There are some subjective questions that get too many votes. Granted, they are sometimes interresting, but that's not the point. The point is that - as far as I can see - some of these are voted up/down entirely depending on some convoluted (or random) social rule. Why does a question about programing humour get voted up 20+ times and a question about how to start a software company voted down? I think that under other circumstances it would be the other way around. But this doesn't happen that much.
Also, you got to admit that it's pretty general, so topics about C#, Java, Ruby get a lot of votes/answers even if it's only modestly interresting. It's understandable: these are the popular and cool languages. Most programmers don't really program on Linux. But it's cool that even so there are experts in these areas.
All-in-all: it's a very good site. Wheter you're a newbie who wants to ask a basic question about memory allocations in C or an expert trying to find an answer to some haunting problem, it's a must-have.
Have fun in trying it out.
