Re: emacs stackexchange beta site

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Udyant Wig <udyantw@gmail.com> writes:

> Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:
> | <snip>
> :
> | The SX are very suited for the Google quick fix age -
> | we may or may not like that age, but even I who dislike
> | both Googling and those SX in principle cannot deny
> | that often (especially error messages) are very suited
> | to Google, and often it is one of the SX sites that
> | instantly provide you with an answer.
>
>  Could you please elaborate why you dislike Googling and SX in
>  principle?

In principle, because they are centralized services, therefore single
points of failure, or worse, of control (spying, censuring).  Also,
they're not present a unique (or a small number of) interfaces, but each
web site has it's own interfaces (user interface or API).  Therefore
they are very hard to use, compared to NNTP API to which each user can
apply consitenly the user interface he chooses.

Also, sociologically, the fact that it's easy to find error messages or
other help on Google/SX makes system authors LESS motivated to provide
working and documented systems in the first place.

This is not a good thing.

Notably, it only works for popular systems.  And error messages are not
discriminating of the various situations: often I have an error message
and find on SX ten different situations where it was issued, and none
matching mine.  In the end, I still have to debug by myself.


Google/SX, it's the blind leading the blinds.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk