"There is no plausible objective answer to this question, thus its not for StackOverflow."
The first half of that sentence is absolutely true. But judging by the enormous number of upvotes, StackOverflow itself (i.e., the people who make it up) disagrees about that second bit.
I fall on the side of Stack Overflow at large. Programming is, among other things, an art. Like in any art, there are sometimes situations where there is no objective answer, and the artisan needs to make a judgment call. And in those cases, a wise artisan may still wish to consider the opinions and experiences of other skilled artisans before deciding on an approach.
Stack Overflow has an excellent format for facilitating this, since it allows some people to share their opinion or experience, and for others to indicate whether they have a similar opinion or experience by simply upvoting that answer. The only thing in Stack Overflow that doesn't actually fit this use case is the green checkbox, but that can be ignored easily enough.
A forum, on the other hand, is a terrible fit for that use case. Forums are for having a conversation, not for getting a quick pulse of what other people are thinking. They leave no way to contribute other than adding an additional post, and they leave no way to get a quick idea of what everyone else is thinking other than reading every single item in the resulting mountain of posts and manually tabulating it all.
It's just possible that the SO masters have fallen out of touch with the SO community. To the extent that they have done so, they are a detriment to that community.
"Within PowerShell, you can call out to your Unix tools" -- so the answer, to the question "how closely does PowerShell emulate Unix scripting?", is "totally". That seems like a pretty objective and plausible answer to me.
The questioner did not ask which was _better_, but how close one is to the other, and on particular dimensions. If a question like that is too controversial or slippery to answer, then I don't see how S.O. can answer any question about choices among technologies.
I think some moderators just saw Windows vs Unix and reflexively decided a food fight must ensue. And that's just sloppy.
>The first half of that sentence is absolutely true. But judging by the enormous number of upvotes, StackOverflow itself (i.e., the people who make it up) disagrees about that second bit.
That's a very dangerous thing, look at what happened to Reddit once there was an influx of people from Digg and 4chan. In fact it is critical that a site's focus is maintained in spite of people's opinions.
>It's just possible that the SO masters have fallen out of touch with the SO community. To the extent that they have done so, they are a detriment to that community.
Not really, SO is just maintaining their site's USP and doesn't want to generate flamebaity discussions. I appreciate them for it.
Tens of thousands of views and many answers and comments later, most everything that's happened in response to the question has been edifying.
There's simply no evidence there of a flamewar having been averted. The closest thing I've seen to an unreasonable insult that I've noticed in relation to the topic is an unfounded comparison to 4chan.
The problem is, a lot of smart people are on SO. I ant them to answer my non-objectively answerable, flamy question. I don't want a 16-year old script wiz to talk about differences between PowerShell and Unix Shell. And I want other visitors to be able to vote what they think is the better answer.
The only other forum I know that kinda matches this criteria is HN, which is far from ideal (it doesn't show you the votes, it usually doesn't show up in search, the discussions are active for less than 2 days and if you come here late, you won't be able to participate).
Looks like I want the same thing as StackOverlow, with a few minor differences... So, why not create another StackExchange forum (they already have 600 or so) JUST for these kinds of questions?
P.S: programmers.sta... is almost as bad as SO, regarding these kinds of questions.
This despite 111 upvotes on the question, 249 upvotes on the accepted answer, and 43 upvotes on the HN link (0 mins ago).
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Dear Stack Overflow Moderators,
Seriously, what is it that you find to be so objectionable about interesting topics?
Love, bunderbunder