But the users wanted a place to get answers from other programmers about non-code questions, so Programmers (then called Not-Programming-Related) was created.
The site was originally for questions that weren't asking about code, but that were still seeking answers from other Programmers, such as What's your favorite programming cartoon?, How to you deal with people who ask you to fix your computer?, Why are there so few female programmers?, How can I keep my hands healthy when I spend all day typing?, What are good snacks to eat while programming?, etc.
At some point during the beta period, SE decided this type of site didn't meet their standards, so decided to change the site's scope and direction to being for "conceptual questions about software development" only.
The problem was, they didn't make that clear to the users, and didn't start enforcing that change until about a year after the site was created. And to make the problem worse, the site name stayed Programmers.SE, which leads many users to think the site is still a StackExchange site about programmers.
So we had a huge community of users who thought the site was a place to get answers from other programmers about non-code questions, and we had a team of moderators who knew the site was actually about conceptual questions about software development.
When questions started getting closed and deleted, particularly highly-voted questions, many users didn't understand why and got upset over it. This lead to a lot of tension in the community, and as a result many of the old users left.
Here's a meta question that explains the full history: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/q/3412/1130
But I think also related is this answer, which contains some graphs showing question trends and more importantly, close rates. Note that none of the graphs include deleted questions. http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/a/3140/1130