Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.
Second: is this really the kind of question SO doesn't want? Their privilege, if so, but in addition to being well-defined it's clearly content that more than a handful of people were interested in (at least 15 upvotes on the most popular answer, multiply it by the ratio of non-user visitors to user visitors). It's a programming question, it has a programming answer, and it certainly has instructional value as an elisp recipe beyond whatever intent the author had.
And as for whether it's lazy -- that's basically the charge here, right? -- I'm not sure I see a functional difference between someone asking a question like this and someone who has written a larger pile of code and is missing a narrow piece of knowledge to complete it. There's possibly arguably a contextual/rhetorical difference where in the latter situation we see the context which led to the question being asked and in the former we don't... but honestly, nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.
To underscore the point, let's just compare it to some other questions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-con... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-t... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight...
It's pretty easy to see what most of these much more popular questions have in common with the one we're talking about here -- as part of whatever these askers are doing, they know there's a capability embedded in a tool that's part of the environment. They just don't know how to bring it out. You could, of course, just tell them to go RTFM for awk, until they get something simple like deleting a line from a file when it matches a string you know, but then again, you could also tell people to go more carefully read the relevant documentation for most programming problems, and if you accept the question and the answer you've got relevant content people are looking for on the site and a recipe people can start learning more from.
I have answered a lot of questions on StackOverflow. One of the worst type of questions is the "please, write this code for me" question. There are frequently lazy or incompetent programmers who just ask for code to do their job, along with students who are asking people to help them cheat on their homework. So many people on SO are very quick to downvote and close any such questions.
Now, there's a grey area. Asking how to do one specific task which is a small component of a larger program is different enough than asking someone to deliver a completed program to you that it's tolerated. Asking something like "how do I use this one facility in a language" is different than asking "please write this tool for me."
There's also just the fickleness of the crowd. Any site which is based on voting, like StackOverflow, Reddit, HN, and so on, can have some questions upvoted and some downvoted due to sheer bad luck, different sets of people looking at different sets of questions, and so on. Trying to expect that a large group will act in a coherent manner, when only a small subset of that group ever even sees any given question (and with strong bias, as different people follow different tags), is just going to set you up for disappointment.
> nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.
Actually, take a look at melling's later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126537
> Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming.
Yep, sounds like he was just asking someone else to do a job for him, he wasn't interested in learning elisp.
I don't know anyone who gets paid to write elisp.
I'd just used AWK or Perl if it were for my job. It's a 1 liner.
perl -ane '...'
Not taking into account specifics of a particular domain - along with questions being judged by people who have no idea what is being asked, but feel the need to judge - was the very thing which made me leave SO.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...