As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable.
I was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there. I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be answering questions there.
Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.
I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.
Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it.
Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself
This is the fundamental problem that forces me to come back to SO and face the snark, though admittedly less and less. Having such a limited understanding of a new (to me) problem niche that I don't even know what words to search with. I keep wanting to ask _that_ question, maybe on programmers. How do you approach a problem when the real problem is just not knowing the specialized language?
The reason you were given for closing the question is terrible ("lacks sufficient information", what?), but you were basically asking a simple math question on a programming site.
This is the trouble with being too specific. It's often better to say: here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that? Describe your actual problem first, before getting into your attempted solution.
>It's often better to say: here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that?
Sounds like a great way to get your question torpedoed by overzealous moderators for being "not a good fit" since there's not a direct answer and it will "invite debate".
There are two math sites, Math Overflow is for professional mathematicians (and started outside the SE network). Math SE is for everyone with math questions.
Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.
I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.
Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it. Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wa...