Do you guys want a programming board?

DeVore

I dont want to slice everything up so fine that we have tons of boards with noone posting, but if there is a strong thread of programming questions clogging up this board then we will happily create a new board.

What say you good people? The Webmaster and Security boards are going down well and are lively.

Anyway, opinions?

DeV.

deRanged

I reckon it'd be a good idea.

Hobbes

Let them post on the tribes board. It will make the Tribes players look like they know something.

@if(!ProgrammingBoard;!Good;!Bad);

(Bleh, I hate @ Functions)

Trojan

Yes, for the record:

I would love it if we got a board, I would love it![1]

Alo.

1. Obscure Keegan reference cos I'm a muppet.

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btw Hobbes: wtf language is that in? What's the @function in aid of?

Al.

[This message has been edited by Trojan (edited 18-07-2000).]

Jak

Could be good.

After a while - it'd make a nice searchable database of answers.

JAK.

Bard

It gets my vote.

For what its worth.

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Bard

|home page|scary éire

Lump

Yea, good Idea.


John

Excelsior

hah hah! no more work for kevin! i'll just come to you guys for the answers.
i fully endorse this product and or event

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It is so lonely here in my indecipherable tower of speech impedimency

Blitzkrieger

can't see it being THAT popular - either we learned programming at some stage and it wouldn't be much use - or you'd get some git come along and ask "What does if mean?"

I can see a lot of rtfm requests and links to other programming resources.

kayos

Yes you have my vote nothing like getting a few brain teasers at lunch to sort out...

Cheers,
Kayos

Draco

Originally posted by Blitzkrieger:
can't see it being THAT popular - either we learned programming at some stage and it wouldn't be much use - or you'd get some git come along and ask "What does if mean?"

I can see a lot of rtfm requests and links to other programming resources.

I've been programming for over 6 years now and I still have questions about stuff. I'm sure there will be a few newbies posting, but I'm sure that there'll be a decent amount of intelligent posts.

So that would be a vote from me.

Draco

Cerberus

Sounds plenty good.

Blitzkrieger

I've been programming (non-professionly) for more than six years too. I'm not saying that just because you're not a beginner does not mean you wouldn't have questions - but you know how annoying it is if someone keeps asking you questions instead of looking things up themselves.

I'm not saying "Don't do a programming board" ( no1 cares what I think anyway ), I'm just trying to point out some difficultys you might have.

podgeen

/callvote programming_board
/vote yes

koloth

no, it's just another board to go reading stuff from. There's not a ton of programming questions anyway, and I can't see any problems with leaving everything the way it is right now.

Pretence

I would agree with the FAQ, as it is the only way that it would be effective and minimise the number of repeated questions being asked.

IMHO, programming in itself would still be a fairly broad topic, it could be broken down in to specific languages. Although there would be no point thinking of doing that yet till you see the popularity of the programming topic alone. It would make the FAQ(if there was one) a lot easier to negotiate also.

tobi

Why not try it out for a month or two.

If it doesn't work out you can always ditch
it.

It wouldn't hurt to have another board in technology and programming would be an obvious choice. I've only been programming for a year can could learn alot from this proposed board.

Hobbes

Technically the boards do have an inbuilt FAQ. It's called the search engine and I have used it quite a lot.

I would intrested in a programming board for many reasons. If you don't want it, don't read it.

I'm pretty sure those people posting for homework, or "I told work I could do it but I can't" type answers will be told pretty sharpish to **** off.

I have no problem answering questions providing..
a) The person has tried a resonable attempt at the problem.
b) The person isn't looking for someone else to do thier job.

koloth

I *do* want to read programming posts, I just don't want to read them on another board. Besides, the volume of posts on this board isn't such that posts on special interest topics (like as programming) get pushed way down the list before people can reply. If that was the case, then sure, create a board for programming, but it's just not the case.

Lucutus

Not a lot

Programming board would be both useful and informative. Set it up. Get Hanna involved in it...

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Lucutus of Borg

Jak

Originally posted by Blitzkrieger:
I've been programming (non-professionly) for more than six years too. I'm not saying that just because you're not a beginner does not mean you wouldn't have questions - but you know how annoying it is if someone keeps asking you questions instead of looking things up themselves.

If you do not want to - or if you can't - then don't reply. I doubt that the volume of posts will be such that it will cost you a significant amount of your time to scour through posts for something worthy of your intellect.

Boards will eventually define themselves by the kind of responses they get - If no one answers "newbie posts" then eventually they will stop.

What i saw on one board which seemed like a great idea, was that replies to certain queries which may recur were made into small FAQ's which became searchable. This way if someone posted a query which had already been dealt with, someone could just point the individual to the FAQ.

JAK.

Cake Fiend

Originally posted by koloth:
I *do* want to read programming posts, I just don't want to read them on another board.

If it's a mouse click away is it that big a deal? Also, if there was a dedicated Programming board it would probably encourage more programming posts, thus justifying its existance. I don't know much about programming, but have an interest, so I read programming-related posts to learn whatever I can pick up (I've so far learnt a few bits and pieces from the Technology board)

Excelsior

it would be great. when us college students finish a project we'll be able to compare and critique. i think a community of programmers, not ha><0rs or snobbish know it alls (* I only work in the language of the Gods- Visual Basic. Therefore I will not answer your query on Prolog. Hah! How infantile. * )would be cool

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It is so lonely here in my indecipherable tower of speech impedimency

kayos

Originally posted by Excelsior:
I only work in the language of the Gods- Visual Basic. Therefore I will not answer your query on Prolog. Hah! How infantile. *

This would be one downfall of a programming board VB vs C/C++/C# vs Java vs ....... kinda posts personnaly I program in VB and SQL but I'm open to all sorts of questions and if I can help I will. As long as the admins keep things in order I think it could grow into a good kb of usefull info and help.
On the FAQ part of things since its a programming board I'm sure we could come up with some way of archiving old posts into a online Knowledge base.... just a thought.

kayos

spod

Live life on the edge, I say go for it pappy devore...

Programming board, providing it was adminned reasonably tightly could be damn useful. I'd certainly check it every morning and evening along with my other regular boards, and post on topics if I could, alot of other people on boards seem to be it tech types so I think it should blossom.

Trojan

I agree with both Sico and Jaks point of view.

Hobbes, it depends on to what degree people are taking this. I know the way I've used the boards for these kind of questions in the past that I would post questions that I needed to know the answers to, whether for work or not.

I might be well able to read pages of docs and figure out how to do make an SQL query to search X fields for the values Y and Z, but if someone here can give me a code snippet, why not? Then I can answer someones question on why their pointer arithmetic or something else I know about isn't working.. yeah? It's about sharing the knowlegde that comes easy to you.

But, on the flip side, you've a good point.

I think from the sheer amount of posts in reply to this thread[1] that it is obviously a good idea.

Just my 2 cents...

Al.

1. Be they positive or negative, they are showing interest.

[This message has been edited by Trojan (edited 19-07-2000).]

logic1

After being abused by both X_OR and Santa on irc the other day over one blinking line of blinkity blinking c i say....

bleh only kidding....

I think it'd be a great idea (as long as santa and X_OR were strictly monitored)
hehe j/k

.logic.

Jak

Originally posted by Hobbes:
Technically the boards do have an inbuilt FAQ. It's called the search engine and I have used it quite a lot.

What exactly is an Inbuilt FAQ?

In any case I am aware there is a search engine and happy that you use it often. However that is not of any relevance.

What I was suggesting was an improvement. An Index of FAQ's dealing with specific topics in full. Using the search engine may yield related posts, however there may not be an answer in them.

Using the search engine would not be as efficient as;

1. The title of posts do not always reflect the content very well.

2. Searching the body of the post for keywords would return a considerable amount of posts as I am sure there are many words common to different problems and languages.

Originally posted by Hobbes:
I would intrested in a programming board for many reasons. If you don't want it, don't read it.

I'm pretty sure those people posting for homework, or "I told work I could do it but I can't" type answers will be told pretty sharpish to **** off.

I have no problem answering questions providing..
a) The person has tried a resonable attempt at the problem.
b) The person isn't looking for someone else to do thier job.

Thanks for sharing your preconditions to helping someone on the programming board.

How about instead of posting 'RTFM' you don't post at all. That way you would contribute the same amount of value to the query. Or is this still about saving yourself time sifting through hundreds of unworthy queries?

In any case, I had one problem this year which has now been sorted. I am not a programmer, however I realised that a piece of code would help me sort data far quicker for anlaysis in my thesis. I read the help files etc. however starting from scratch made it near impossible to achieve what I wanted in the amount of time I had.

The reason I would like a programming board in the future is because I believe it is a good way to learn a bit about programming.


JAK.

satchmo

Trojan's right. Be it good or bad comments, there are comments nonetheless. I for one would be very interested in a programming board, you only have to look at www.gamedev.net or www.lionhead.co.uk to see how popular dedicated programming boards can be.

I figure it's a case of 'if you build it, they wil come...'

SCRUB

To not have one is stupid .
Its just one other page that is very bloody
usefull towards game.

If someone was to write a good mod for quake or such a thing It would bring Irish gaming into more focus(not just for playing quake but other things such as development companies amongst others) as we need it here damn it.

The other big thing is on these boards rather than gamedev.net you could probably meet up with these people and talk about it
and mull it over together etc feeding of the creativity of each other which could be excellent.

To not have one is silly in my opinion . For the sake of putting an extra link and page you could really do something good here.

Think about it .


El_Scrub

Shiminay

What are you babbling on about Scrub??? They're talking Programming not gaming!!!

I think it's a good idea for a seperate board btw...

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Bard

I figure it's a case of 'if you build it, they wil come...'

Are we talking about a programming board or a Billie board?

Go for it dudes, - stick it up already!... It'll deffo' be used.

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Bard

|home page|scary éire

Shiminay

GWAN DA BILLIE!!!

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Trojan

Hey Tom,

I think that enough interest has been shown here - if you are in agreement with me can you sort out putting up the board?

Cheers,
Al.

DeVore

Yup, a programming board will go up in the big revision we are planning. That may be a month from now but it depends on certain things (not the least of which is Mr C. Warrior's holidays )

DeV.

Cloud

I've just added the Programming board on a trial basis so it's up to you guys to prove that it's worth keeping after the cabinet reshuffle next month!

John.
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P.S. DeVore, will you be my running mate in the US presidential elections, it's part of my revised global domination plan (okay, there's a small problem in that we're not US citizens but I have a scanner and am a whiz at PhotoShop so that's easily fixed).

Baz_

I would've voted for the board if it wasn't up already, ah well hohum.

I think that tech and programming are way different, to me technology board is used for hardware problems, that's me personally, but now I have a board here I can post to for programming problems, without going to programmersheaven.com.

And don't forget (to the person who refuted the gaming link) that all games have a little programming in them.

just MHO.

WOOHOOO!