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It was a short well-defined question with given input and a specific output. Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming. Someone else even starred it so they must have found it to be useful.

If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better question?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-some...



It is arguably more specific.

It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them.

That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or not.


Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is something you should know when leaving primary school.


Are you saying that you can't find a point of view where it would be a more specific question? Because that's what I meant when I said 'arguably'.

Saying that you can find a point of view where it isn't more specific isn't really that interesting (to me) as a response to that. Hopefully the rest of my comment is enough to see that I was not particularly defending the SE status quo.


If I squint hard enough...

Anyway, I was just refering to the first sentence. The rest of your comment is an interesting proposal, though at this moment I don't have any thoughts on it worth sharing.


'arguably' still requires a reasonable position that declares it true, otherwise literally everything is arguable.


I think reasonableness is implicit enough in "find a point of view", do you think I should recalibrate that expectation?




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