Stack Overflow

If you’re a programmer, you know the problem of solution googlability. It’s particularly prominent in mainstream languages (and one of the things I decried in my What’s Wrong with VBA series, as VBA is particularly bad in that respect); you have a problem, you google for it, unless you’re coding in a good awesome well-designed freak language like Ruby, Python, or Haskell, all you get back is trash and spam.

So, since you’re reading blogs and a programmer (or you’d have stopped reading by now, I guess), you know Joel on Software. Now this guy and his team have done something: They took the Wiki approach of “everybody can edit”, added Digg’s “let’s vote stuff up”, and made the whole thing a generic programming Q&A site.

Behold, and witness, the rise of Stack Overflow.

From his launch post:

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. This is a community project, so I’m being careful to avoid saying this is how it will work… that’s up to the community. But this is roughly what I have in mind.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? [...]

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

Sounds great! It has tags, it’s not restricted to one programming language, it could provide the framework for thousands of programmers collaborating. And the best thing: They plan to “keep it ad-free and open to the public forever”.

You’ll need an OpenID to log in – I got one at myOpenID myself. Too bad it’s not possible to log in without, but whatever – I guess this approach has more promise than the closed one that Microsoft tried to force upon us with that whole Live ID crap, but still shares the same weaknesses (which are, mainly, another party involved and a central point of failure).

Nevertheless, I do think this could be awesome. Let’s see where it goes.