Programming Language Design and Implementation

Rydwolf Programs

2:50 AM

@Adám Why was this flagged

Henry WH Hack v3.0

4:04 AM

Prepare for beta!

Adám

4:28 AM

@RydwolfPrograms Dunno. Maybe someone thought it was inappropriate to advertise something that costs money.

Ginger

12:18 PM

it's beta day babyyyyy

Seggan

Woooo

Unrelated String

1:37 PM

🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

mousetail

Sometime this week

Seggan

Most likely today

mousetail

Eh with layoffs I expect they'll be busy and I think 2 or 3 more months

Adám

6–8 weeks

Bbrk24

2:45 PM

Would asking about github.com/bbrk24/Trilangle/issues/1 be considered on-topic for PLDI? Not in a “anyone want to do this?” way, but in a “how do I approach this?” way

Rydwolf Programs

Yes

mousetail

@Bbrk24 If you just want advice on improving the spagetti then code review would be more appropriate

Bbrk24

No, not improving spaghetti. My current approach is fundamentally flawed and I don’t know a better way

No amount of untangling spaghetti will fix that

mousetail

Then yes, if you can make it generic enough

Rydwolf Programs

Why "if you can make it generic enough"

mousetail

2:48 PM

General rule for all SE sites

Questions can't be for a specific situation

Rydwolf Programs

Yeah but even a very specific question can be helpful to other people

mousetail

If you write it in such a way that it's findable and applicable to other people

Rydwolf Programs

Like on CR, the questions aren't by any means generic, the answers are. As long as there's some genericism somewhere it's fine

mousetail

Answers should be more specific than questions

Rydwolf Programs

Not as a general rule

Look at CR

Look at any site. There's often general answers applicable to tons of specific scenarios

mousetail

2:50 PM

Code review is a very odd case since questions are fundamentally extremely specific

Rydwolf Programs

Like Harper's copy-paste "YOU HAVE AN OPEN NEUTRAL" on DIY.se

Seggan

@mousetail except SO :P

mousetail

Generally a answer being more general than a question means the answer does not actually answer the question

a unfortunatly very common case

This is the issue with SO, way to specific questions becoming canonicals so none of the answers actually relate to the question remotely

Rydwolf Programs

An answer doesn't need to address every specificity of the question in extreme detail. Often just being pointed in the right direction is good enough

And there's nothing stopping an answerer from including extra information relevant to different but similar situations

mousetail

You could avoid the whole issue by just asking good questions

Rydwolf Programs

2:53 PM

A good question is one that helps people

mousetail

No

Rydwolf Programs

If you ask a question that doesn't help yourself based on an assumption it might help someone else, that's a bad question

mousetail

A good question can be answered by good answers

but it must actually match the answers

Rydwolf Programs

?

A question's quality is independent of its answers

mousetail

Take the famous HTML with regex question

The question is not actualy about parsing HTML with regex

Rydwolf Programs

2:54 PM

A good question is one that helps people. A good answer is one that helps people. That's the end of it.

mousetail

Lol no

Rydwolf Programs

All of the other rules and recommendations are just heuristics for making questions and answers more helpful for more people

mousetail

Have you even visited SO

Questions must be findable

Rydwolf Programs

Yes, and the majority of questions and answers are unhelpful to more than maybe one person

@mousetail ...because if they aren't, they're unhelpful to more than one person

mousetail

Those questions shouldn't be asked

Rydwolf Programs

2:55 PM

Why?

Helping one person is better than helping none

mousetail

Because we're trying to create a databse of knowledge, not answer questions

Unrelated String

it's hard for a problem to be so specific that fixing it literally won't help anyone else

Rydwolf Programs

I'd rather someone ask a hyper-specific question that helps only them then ask no question at all

Because at least the former helps 1 instead of 0 people

mousetail

Those types of questions belong on discord or reddit

Unrelated String

it's helpful to you and everyone else if you make the question as general as it can reasonably be, but that's that

mousetail

2:56 PM

SE is purely for collecting knowledge

Rydwolf Programs

Yes, and knowledge which helps one person is still knowledge

And you can still glean info from people asking similar questions to you

mousetail

No that's just noise

Rydwolf Programs

Even if SE is optimized as a database for common questions, it still works perfectly fine for the occasional specific question

Look at every single SE site and you'll find that's the case

mousetail

They usually get closed pretty quickly

Rydwolf Programs

Specific questions that nobody else can use just fall to page a zillion with one upvote. They don't hurt anybody.

@mousetail On what grounds?

mousetail

2:58 PM

Duplicate

Rydwolf Programs

And I don't think I've ever seen that being the case

Unrelated String

you can't always even expect an asker to know whether or not their question is too specific

Rydwolf Programs

@mousetail Duplicate of what? We're not talking about hyper-specific questions that are also dupes

mousetail

I always close them myself when I see them so I'm a bit biased, but they do get closed quick

Rydwolf Programs

I think we're talking about different things here

mousetail

2:59 PM

Duplicate of the generic version of that question

Rydwolf Programs

What makes you assume there's a general version of every question?

Plenty of questions have more than one moving part

mousetail

Often they can be closed as needing focus too

If there is more than 1 moving part

Rydwolf Programs

Sounds like you just want to close for the sake of closing

mousetail

No, I want to reduce noise

Rydwolf Programs

What does this noise harm?

mousetail

3:00 PM

People looking for answers

Rydwolf Programs

How do overly specific questions get in the way for them?

Aren't they hard to find?

Undiscoverable?

mousetail

No they often show up higher in the search results than legit questions

even if they have no answers or the answers are extremly specific

I'm sure you have plenty of times searched something up but only found way too specific answers only applicable to OP and not you

Rydwolf Programs

Actually I haven't

Most of the time it's just stuff unrelated to what I'm looking for

Unrelated String

^

mousetail

It happenes to me all the time

Rydwolf Programs

3:02 PM

Maybe you just have overly generic questions

Unrelated String

often the top results actually are overly specific questions but the top answers are general

Rydwolf Programs

"Too broad" is a close reason, "too specific" isn't, if that tells you anything

mousetail

Too specific can be closed as "not reproducable or caused by a typo" on SO

Or duplicate or needs more focus

Rydwolf Programs

@mousetail That has nothing to do with specificity

mousetail

It does

There is a lot of overlap between too specific and too broad

Rydwolf Programs

3:03 PM

An irreproducible error would mean that OP's asking the wrong thing, not being too specific

Unrelated String

^

which does happen a lot, but is a very different problem

mousetail

Take this question: stackoverflow.com/q/76264539/6333444

Rydwolf Programs

That looks incredibly vague and underspecified, not too specific

Unrelated String

that's not overly specific, that's embarrassingly general

^

mousetail

It's obviously too specific

Unrelated String

3:05 PM

it's literally just sheer incompetence presented specifically

mousetail

Also yea it needs details and clarity as well

Rydwolf Programs

I think you're just seeing specificity as a symptom of other issues with questions and assigning the badness to the specificity instead of the cause of it

mousetail

Many questions have multiple issues

Unrelated String

because it definitely correlates with overall lazy and otherwise low quality question-asking

mousetail

but the main reason they are not worth salvaging is that they are too specific

Unrelated String

3:06 PM

but it's never the cause

mousetail

if it needs more clarity but is specific enough I might comment asking for clarification

Rydwolf Programs

My goal on this site, correct me if I'm mistaken, is to help as many people as possible. An overly specific question might have a very slight negative impact by cluttering a few searches, but it also significantly helps at least one person. That's a tradeoff we should be willing to make.

Unrelated String

maybe not worth community effort to salvage, but possibly worth asker effort :P

Rydwolf Programs

^

Unrelated String

and it's not helping anyone to just nuke it from orbit instead

Rydwolf Programs

3:07 PM

Closed questions are still search clutter

mousetail

@RydwolfPrograms Especially when the site is young we really really need to avoids specific questions. If we have a solid body of generic questions to search it doesn't matter as much

Rydwolf Programs

Might as well make them potentially tangentially relevant to searches instead of answerless and definitely useless

@mousetail Why early on? A specific question is still a question and an answer and votes.

And rep and possibly a new active user.

mousetail

But if you ask it more generically it can help more people

Rydwolf Programs

Not necessarily

mousetail

If a question is too specific ask a new one then close the other one as a duplicate of the new one

To avoid the SO issue where none of the questions match the answers

Rydwolf Programs

3:08 PM

Often the problem is that you don't know what the general version of your question is

You don't know what to look for

If I have a specific bug in my parser, I can't really get much help from asking about parser bugs in general

Even if there does happen to be a more general category of parser bugs mine fits into

mousetail

Exactly, so you'd help then if you rephrased their question then closed as duplicate

Unrelated String

if there's a legit dupe target that's a completely different matter :P

Rydwolf Programs

^

mousetail

You are creating a dupe target specifically for the question

The dupe target is posted later

Rydwolf Programs

But IMO you shouldn't prioritize future viewers over the asker

mousetail

3:15 PM

I just don't want to end up with terrible canonicals

Rydwolf Programs

If someone comes here looking for help we shouldn't be criticizing them for looking for help for themselves instead of help for some vague other

@mousetail Nobody's saying specific questions should be canonical, you can always ask a more generic version

And we will have meta to discuss things like that

SO was the first SE site. They didn't have the knowledge of the future to know that what they were doing would end up with dumb results. We do have the context to know how our future will look, and we can avoid a lot of SO's pitfalls.

We should be using that to the benefit of every person here tho, and treat askers as people rather than canonical question factories

Bbrk24

I just thought of a meme that I can’t make now

Unrelated String

sad

mousetail

3:44 PM

@RydwolfPrograms Early questions will be canonicals

Rydwolf Programs

Not all of them

mousetail

Most of them

most likely someone will ask a similar question later

Henry WH Hack v3.0

4:46 PM

BETA BETA!

Rydwolf Programs

I'M IN

@Ginger @lyxal @mousetail @Bbrk24 IT'S HAPPENING

Ginger

AAAAAAAAAAAAA

mousetail

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I'm user #8

Ginger

#9

Rydwolf Programs

I'm holding back my #1 question, compiling vs. interpreting, for public beta

Ginger

4:48 PM

alright alright

PLDI has officially launched!

6

we did it baby

alright, let's ask our first question

mousetail

Let me answer it

Ginger

hmm, I don't actually know what to write

I've got no precedent!

Mast

@Ginger How many example questions did you post?

mousetail

Luckily we have 80 questions prepared

Mast

^

May 12 at 17:41, by Mast

@WormholeX If you write them down and put some thought into the question already, you can help the site make a good start.

Adám

4:52 PM

Hey, I posted a question, but it doesn't show on the site.

Mast

Days, weeks of preparation.

mousetail

I see it

@Mast We did talk about it briefly...

Adám

mousetail

I do have a question prepared but it will take a few more hours to format properly

languagedesign.stackexchange.com/q/1/8

Mast

@Adám languagedesign.stackexchange.com/questions/1/…

Question #1

Adám

4:53 PM

OK, it was just slow.

@Mast Yay! And I didn't even prepare it in advance.

Rydwolf Programs

Should we have a tokens tag?

Ginger

alright, question posted

Rydwolf Programs

I feel like that wouldn't really be very helpful for searching, since it could be talking about them in tons of different contexts

Adám

@RydwolfPrograms Surely tokenisation will be common. tokens avoids UK/US issue.

Mast

@RydwolfPrograms In beta, lots of tags can be created that later are removed.

Feeds

4:54 PM

Ginger has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

Rydwolf Programs

@Adám I feel like that should be lexing or tokenization (we can always do a synonym for US spelling)

Adám

Good point.

Ginger

@Mast emails were sent out, right?

Adám

I didn't get one.

Ginger

nice, question 3

Mast

4:56 PM

@Ginger Takes a while.

Ginger

ah

mousetail

Is it possible to move a room to a different site?

Ginger

oooh

Mast

Keep in mind that suggested edits need approval from people with 500 rep and over. So, currently, the only way to get them approved in any decent amount of time is for the OP to approve the edit. If you post a question or an answer, keep this in mind. Your activity may be required.

Ginger

did we get a main room?

I don't think chat's registered the new site yet

Bbrk24

4:57 PM

aaa I’m at work for another four hours

Ginger

it has not registered the site

Mast

@mousetail Do you want it to be moved?

Ginger

oh right, we were gonna do a meta discussion for the name

lemme do that real quick

Bbrk24

the “join the community” button doesn’t work

Ginger

or should I wait until we're out of private beta?

mousetail

4:58 PM

@Mast Would be great yea

If I search for programing language design in chat I get this:

Adám

Doesn't the site have a main chat room?

Mast

~~We can create a new room, I think. And continue everything there. The issue is this current room is on the Area51 server.~~ Let me check on that...

mousetail

Bbrk24

okay I figured it out

Ginger

u n d e f i n e d

Henry WH Hack v3.0

4:59 PM

The Garbage Collector

General discussion for langdev.stackexchange.com

8

4

Feeds

Mast has frozen this room.

Mast

This room is now obsolete. All further discussion will happen at the new Programming Language Design and Implementation room.

Ginger

room topic changed to Programming Language Design and Implementation: MOVED TO chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/146046/…! Room for discussion of area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/127456/… [discussion] [site-definition]

The Garbage Collector

Transcript for

Programming Language Design and Imple…