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Comment by monksy | Hacker News Reader

I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks:

Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API?

I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question.

For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out with a language/tool/library. I haven't found it very useful for complex problems.

Oh well. I've written about my rants on SO before. [I won't link here but it is in my submission history]

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Rather than outright closing a question it would be more productive if moderators could move the question to the forum it belongs. This type of question is quite common and if the powers that be have decreed that it doesn't belong in the general stack overflow area then a place for these questions should be created.

What forum is that? SO doesn't have forums AFAIK, only questions and answers.

I would assume that previous poster was referring to stackexchange forum other than stackoverflow.

I was referring to the different stack exchange sites as forums.

Why would you ask that instead of browsing through the most recent 50 questions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service ?

I don't know much about how SO works but your query got truncated to:

  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang

It didn't seem particularly useful for such a question. I could see why the poster might be tempted to ask.

Perhaps there is a particular way that SO should be searched? The recursive irony is both amusing and annoying: doing a google search, coming to an SO answer where a commenter rants "why don't you spend a few seconds with Google."

It was truncated because monksy and I used placeholders. If you use real values for lang and service you get good results, here's an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java+oauth

Do you notice that all the questions in the result are tagged both java and oauth?

monksy didn't say which particular languages and services he's interested in (the male pronoun seems safe in his case) but I venture to guess that if suitable libraries do exist, then there'll be SO questions about them already and they're easy to find.

"Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API?"

This is explicitly listed as off-topic:

Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, "software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."

I disagree. The question does not ask to find a library but rather it asks about the internal workings of a service.

And this is precisely why I left SO. Without fail, the most interesting and useful questions for me on the site were more or less surveys of the population -- "What's a good library for reading XML in C#?", "XYZ looks like it was abandoned, is there a good replacement?", "Why is Python 3's virtualenv different" and that kind of thing.

Maybe that's just me, because if there ever is a question with one correct technical answer, it's easy to figure out on your own. The things I want to interact with a human to figure out are universally to do with historical reasons for things, ergonomic choices, and opinions on quality. I want a smart person with strong opinions, not a politically correct karma grinder who can type quickly.

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