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points by wouldbecouldbe 19 hours ago | 0 comments
To be honest the accepted answer is just more to the point and helpful. I get your reasoning and its a nicer story, and the credit part.
[–] santadays 18 hours ago
I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.

I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.

The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.

There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.

I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.

[–] jmull 15 hours ago
To me the voting is pretty much on target.

They are both good answers, depending on what you're looking for. The first is clear, concise, and correct -- pretty much exactly what you want to read and write code with the $ prefix.

The other one is more interesting in a behind-the-scenes way, and goes through the thinking process behind it.

I can see why the first answer gets the most votes -- that's usually all people want. The other gets votes for the people looking for a somewhat deeper answer and are willing to spend more time reading to get it.

It shouldn't necessarily be about winning the voting... different perspectives are useful.

[–] santadays 14 hours ago
I agree. I am just reminiscing on what came before StackOverflow. How it changed things, what it's intents were and what it actually became. We had alot of people doing their own thing, on their own blogs, creating a community of sorts. But there was a downside that it was incomplete, everyone presented their information in whatever format they wanted, etc, etc. StackOverflow definite did it's job in making this all more efficient in getting the question you were asking answered. But that seems to have come at a cost, it was a kind of harsh environment to participate in.

But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.

[–] firesteelrain 19 hours ago
I had the same thought it’s a great example of why StackOverflow does work in this case.