About good quality and kind of questions in "Programmers"

Question

Just a newbie here and I also read a lot about the difference between "Programmers" and "StackOverFlow". Yes, for a new-comer it's really careful and easy to be confused. So what I continue wanna know is:

1) Since "Programmers" are welcomed for concepts, ideas of a certain problem. Or your nice suggestions to a new programming language's features……ect. So if I have a problem about programming (not sure which language or just use pseudo one), Just wanna know the algorithm or something idea about that, can I ask questions here?(e.g: I don't know what COM is, and I have a lot of questions about COM and its usage instead of a certain programming language, so that's very abstract……)

2) If I'm working as a software architect, and to a certain problem, can I ask here about my ideas about software design, or something related to OOP's design in general to have a discussions with all of you?

Answer 1

Asking about Algorithms is fine. Asking about how to use COM as it's a Windows API, should be directed to Stack Overflow. General architectural and software design questions should be fairly focused and conceptual in nature. They should also be equally applicable across most programming languages.

Example: Is the use of “utf8=✓” preferable to “utf8=true”?

This question is good because it's a tricky design problem: "Why do I see this odd thing pop up in software designs repeatedly?" It turns out to be an IE8 encoding hack.

Good questions here may involve a fair amount of initial effort on your part, we expect you to have tried something before asking here. They also should converge to a small set of answers or a single answer.

Lengthy discussion-based questions should be asked in the Whiteboard