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I was wondering if you thought that there are$ languages at dream in code that are neglected. Okay, so there is the "Other Languages" forum. But we all know that that forum gets very little attention, and most people think that the languages covered there are so obscure that they have no chance of figuring them out. At last count, there were 252 pages in the c++ forum, and only 17 in the other languages forum. Do you think that there is a language that requires a little more attention? Personally, i think they could do one for assembly in general, and maybe a single forum for platform-specific languages, such as MS-DOS (which i believe is very important in the IT world).
There is only 17 pages in that forum because there aren't a lot of questions for it. There just isnt the need for a forum dedicated to a language like Assembly, given there are actually quite few questions regarding it. There are forums here for all languages, the "Other Languages" forum covers languages that aren't discussed a lot, and creating a forum for a language where there might be 15 questions a month on is just a waste of space, in my opinion.
I can guarantee that if we were to start getting large amounts of questions and traffic for Assembly Chris would open a forum for it.
A language that deserves a little more attention? Perhaps Matlab and Assembly. But I don't think they deserve their own forum. All the industry standard languages have their own forum and the little questions we get about other languages really belong in the other languages.
I have yet to see a question asked about a good programming language in the "other languages" forum where I said to myself "Damn why don't they have a forum for that language?"
Now if we went into the specialty languages like gaming, XNA, OpenGL and DirectX could probably get their own forums... but still we have little questions in there to power their own forum. Game programming handles it all just fine.
It is clear you did not recognize my original intention in opening this thread. All i wanted was to promote discussion. I realized at the time of writing that it would be a total waste of space to create a forum for each individual language known to man (though you couldn't, pardon the hyperbole). Perhaps i should have made that known in my initial post.
Most questions don't fall into strictly one category. You see VB questions in Database all the time, because a VB programmer is trying to talk to a database. ASP.NET has C# specific questions, because the C# is in ASP.NET. And, they might be talking to a database.
However, for the most part, the questions fall under a single category; stuff taught in school. See how active the Ruby forum is? Ruby, along with Python, XSLT, and countless others, is something programmers usually teach themselves. Programmers rarely post to forums, knowing the answer is "out there".
The people who post to forums are those who aren't just learning a specific language, but the art of programming itself. Once you firmly grasp the principals of programming, the language is not that relevant.
I'm a bit surprised that there are not more questions about Groovy or Scala. Given the numerous scripting languages which have sprung up recently that compile to Java byte code (Groovy, Scala, Jython, JRuby, etc) I'd expect a lot more people to be exploring them. Then again, the site still seems to be geared mostly toward beginners, who are probably too busy earning Java proper to deal with other byte code languages. I suppose this is why there is a distinct lack of other advanced topics like EJB 3, Spring 2, Struts 2, Guice, Java FX, etc. Oh well.
I think the coverage is pretty good. I'm confused by the "Computer Science" area, as it seems to be just an off topic place. Questions about motherboards and home networking don't have much to do with computer science.
All i wanted was to promote discussion. I realized at the time of writing that it would be a total waste of space to create a forum for each individual language known to man
That's quite confusing. Why would you want to discuss something when you already know the answer and the reasoning behind it?
It'd be like me opening a thread about asking if Mountain Dew is the reason I end up staying up all night, and closing the post with saying "It does have caffeine, and that does keep me awake".
I understand that although my example is simplified, I think it's comparable to this post.
QUOTE
Actually, I'd love to see tagging
Yes, me too. This would be an excellent solution to giving the smaller languages a little more pub. It would also help the search function out greatly.
I'm confused by the "Computer Science" area, as it seems to be just an off topic place. Questions about motherboards and home networking don't have much to do with computer science.
Same here. It's a shame to get all excited about seeing posts in that forum only to be disappointed when you see they are all hardware/tech support posts. I almost made a post in the forum complaining about just that, but then decided not to because I thought I might be contributing to the off-topic posts. But now I can see I'm not the only one who is annoyed by this.
While we're bitching about forum headings, I've noted before that Perl and Python have almost nothing to do with each other, aside from starting with P.
We can look at doing some re-organizing. What would you like to see done with the computer science forum? It was kind of a test and if it's not going the direction you'd like to see, we can get rid of it, or merge it.
Regarding other languages, I'd like to actually expand in to more .NET and up and coming languages.
I want to keep progressing as you guys progress through your careers and school.
Maybe a Network Support section to weed out Computer Science networking posts, separate Perl and Python, other than that I am pretty happy with the way this site turned out.
Some forums are harder to find than others ie community forum, maybe an option to search for a specific member to view profiles? just a thought.
I noticed a lot of people starting up group projects on the forums, maybe a section for that?
4 May, 2008 - 10:23 AM
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