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Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don't. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning.

 

Because we believe so deeply in learning, we are willing to go to great lengths to suppress the discussion, debate, and opinions that -- while plenty entertaining -- cause most forums to inevitably break down.

Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don't. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning.

Because we believe so deeply in learning, we are willing to go to great lengths to suppress the discussion, debate, and opinions that -- while plenty entertaining -- cause most forums to inevitably break down.

Every day we get opinionated questions asked here. People seem to think that this is the place to ask them. New users point to the old open questions that have fallen through the cracks of time as reason that their question should be open too. Old Stack Overflow users continue to suggest reposting discussions on NotProgrammingRelated Programmers.SE. Consider this exchange on a Stack Overflow question:

Every day we get opinionated questions asked here. People seem to think that this is the place to ask them. New users point to the old open questions that have fallen through the cracks of time as reason that their question should be open too. Old Stack Overflow users continue to suggest reposting discussions on NotProgrammingRelated Programmers.SE. Consider this exchange on a Stack Overflow question:

This is not an appropriate question here because it is opinion-based. You might get help at Programmers. — Ed Cottrell (deleted)
@EdCottrell programmers has the same rules about opinion-based questions as SO. Please take a look at the help centre there before sending people our way. cheers. – MetaFight
@MetaFight my apologies. I see lots of these kinds of questions over there and didn't realize they weren't acceptable. – Ed Cottrell

Programmers.SE is not Quora, or Reddit or any other site. We are a site to give practical answers to questions of software design and architecture. It says so right in our tour:

Referring to the specific question of http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/75486/why-arent-young-programmers-interested-in-mainframes when I started the close vote process on it wasn't its popularity - it was the tag junior-programmer that is littered with bad questions and itself being on the verge of a meta-tag. When looking through a tag, I tend to start at the oldest as those are the ones that have the most answers and the least fixable. This often means seeing some of the old popular ones before the newer less popular ones. However, the phrasing of:

The question asked in the post http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/75486/why-arent-young-programmers-interested-in-mainframes falls exactly into that category:

This is not an appropriate question here because it is opinion-based. You might get help at Programmers. — Ed Cottrell (deleted)
@EdCottrell programmers has the same rules about opinion-based questions as SO. Please take a look at the help centre there before sending people our way. cheers. – MetaFight
@MetaFight my apologies. I see lots of these kinds of questions over there and didn't realize they weren't acceptable. – Ed Cottrell

Programmers.SE is not Quora, or Reddit or any other site. We are a site to give practical answers to questions of software design and architecture. It says so right in our tour:

Referring to the specific question of Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes? when I started the close vote process on it wasn't its popularity - it was the tag junior-programmer that is littered with bad questions and itself being on the verge of a meta-tag. When looking through a tag, I tend to start at the oldest as those are the ones that have the most answers and the least fixable. This often means seeing some of the old popular ones before the newer less popular ones. However, the phrasing of:

The question asked in the post Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes? falls exactly into that category: