On Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 12:35:39 PM UTC-6, Uri Wilensky wrote: > > Many programmers feel as you do, but in my discussions with users over > many years, they much prefer to be part of a community, and they feel that > netlogo-users is a community. > My long experience with this convinces me that for novices and > non-self-identified programmers, netlogo-users is by far more effective > than SO. > SO is preferred by self-identified programmers, but that community doesn’t > need as much help. To keep NetLogo low threshold, as is one of my top > priorities, netlogo-users has to be a go-to place. That in no way precludes > the use of SO, which is veery useful for more self-identified programmers, > and our developers do of course check it. But this should not be at the > expense of netlogo-users. >
I understand, and that seems reasonable. I'm not sure how the following information fits into the picture, but maybe worth mentioning: Nearly all of the NetLogo questions on SO are from newbies. Perhaps that's because people are going to the Yahoo list instead for more involved questions, or maybe it's just that NetLogo is fairly easy to use and has good documentation, so that experienced programmers don't have very many problems that they can't solve themselves. (I don't have a very high level of skill with NetLogo, but when I ask a NetLogo question on SO, it's usually pretty difficult, and may have no answer.) The other significant point is that the few people who regularly answer newbie NetLogo questions on SO are very charitable. We help people with questions that would usually be downvoted and closed as improperly formulated, don't show enough work on the part of the questioner, etc. (Don't tell the SO gods that we're not following the rules!) For my own part, I want to help people get started with NetLogo rather than scare them away, so that even when I tell someone that their question is improper, I do it in a more helpful way. (I'm nice but not as nice when I answer questions about other languages on SO. I think it's reasonable for expectations to be a bit different given the goals and initial learning cost of some languages.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "netlogo-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to netlogo-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
