Is my question, about TypeScript and learning difficulties off-topic because I suggest supporting claims with evidence?

Question

I asked https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/440554 and defined what I though were objective criteria, and hoped to leverage the site's expertise in a software engineering topic (I certainly couldn't find it myself online) - I expected users here might be familiar with studies into the ease of use of programming languages. I also looked in the help center's on-topic section and recommendations for scholarly papers might be considered off topic, but I'm not looking for casual recommendations but conclusive results.

I looked for similar questions anyway, for example questions about studies and noticed some closed and some still open. Even the closed ones seem to often get good answers, so perhaps it was just a case of making sure I didn't fall foul of these issues: https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6487/42685

It wasn't one of these:

Recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples), or projects to undertake

It wasn't a

book review or suggestion

It's not:

Asking for a link to something or statistics

Because a good answer would be helping to unpack and explain the study, and why it was/wasn't conclusive. You need software engineering expertise for that.

Which leads me onto:

• No actual problem to solve
• Not drawing from expert knowledge of the community
• Will suffer from link rot or become out of date

However, I stated my problem, I need expert know to both find and explain any potential study, and as most journals don't go out of print and destroy their archives, it seems unlikely to suffer link rot. A properly answered question can cite the paper and summarise it, meaning there's no concern of transient external sources (say if the paper is, or becomes stuck behind a paywall).

Is there a place where I can ask such questions?

This section only send to deal with Software Recommendations, which this definitely isn't.

I've also seen posts of this sort answered with "ask in chat", but I already lined before posting, and to paraphrase Pulp Fiction:

Chat's dead Duga, chat's dead.

After my question got closed, I hoped to find out in the comments why and ask for advice on making form slightly off topic, to being on-topic - perhaps my earnest question could be improved.

But it looks like anything that even looks like a recommendation is considered blatantly off-topic, and the status quo is to delete first, allow asking these questions never.

Perhaps the overzealous deletion is why I didn't see as many similar questions as I'd hoped.

So was my question really so blatantly off-topic, or can the community leverage it's expertise and knowledge and answer it?

Answer 1

It wasn't one of these:

Recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples)

It may not be immediately clear to you, but our community here has developed a consensus that 3rd party resource requests like the request for a scientific study fall into this category. This is somewhat different to the situation before ~2015, when the site had a different name ("Programmers.Stackexchange") and covered a wider scope. Hence you may be able to find some older questions about such resources - but don't take that as a justification to ask such questions today.

I cannot say I am 100% behind this rule, since such studies as backup references may indeed contribute to the quality of an answer. However, explicitly asking such questions is frowned upon on this site, and our community does not see this as a huge contradiction.

For the particular question you asked, however, I think it is pretty likely that in case it would have been left open it would not have gotten any answer. One clue here is the fact that you could not find any study using the usual search engines by yourself. Another clue here is that the question's topic isn't really a mainstream software engineering topic. To my understanding, it is more a neuro-psychological topic, and you may ask about it at Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange. But beware, if you ask there, I would recommend to primarily ask for their experts knowledge about it, not for scientific papers.

Answer 2

The question falls into what we consider recommending resources, but would also typically turn into the equivalent of asking for a link since we would not be able to reproduce the paper here. Even if it's not a link and a citation, there's no guarantee that the question would be valuable to someone in the future without reproducing the whole paper, which isn't permitted.

Finding resources like scholarly articles is something that you would use Google Scholar, ResearchGate, or CiteSeerX. These are search engines designed to find relevant material.

When you post a question to Software Engineering, or any of the other Stack Exchange sites, you are asking a question of hundreds of people. We aren't search engines. The expectation is that the questions asked here take advantage of the things that people have - their knowledge, education, and (perhaps most importantly) experience.

The best questions to ask here are ones about problems that you are facing. The inability to find a paper or study isn't a problem. Why do you need that paper? What problem do you hope to solve by reading it? That would make a good question to ask here. However, you would need to be open to people applying their knowledge, education, and experience rather than just giving links to third-party resources that may become unavailable in the future.

I'd also point out that the "overzealous deletion" is what helps keep the quality of the questions that remain much higher. It has been a standard practice to quickly close and delete questions that are off-topic and have a low chance of being salvaged for over 6 years now. Prior to deletion, people were using previously asked and closed questions to justify their question remaining, thinking that it was better or that they had addressed the reasons for closure, when the real reason is that the community doesn't want those types of questions here at all. It also prevents people from answering in the comments, which only promotes more bad questions since they get the info one way or another.

If you do want to leverage the expertise of this community, I'd take a step back and look at what problem you are facing. Instead of asking for information that you would get out of a search engine or perhaps a librarian, think about what you would ask a colleague in the office. Then, try asking that here.

Answer 3

The fundamental issue is we need questions that have answers that are so objectively correct that the first answer to get it right will squeeze out room for any others. When that fails the votes are meaningless because for all anyone knows all the answers are correct and the highest votes just go to the first answers posted.

That breaks the site. It lowers its usefulness. That’s why we have to be picky.

And remember, were fallible humans. So we make mistakes. But we err on the side of protecting the site.

That said there are cases where subjective questions have worked out. A redeeming answer gets posted and casts the question in a new light. That's fine, so long as this answer squeezes out others. It's why we have the lifeboat badge.

But that's fairly rare and can take time. A poor reception needs to happen quickly because the new questions tell people what the site is about louder than any rules we post.

In short, asking a subjective question is risky. It's not off topic or against the rules. But can cause problems that we preemptively guard against. You'll find the actual rules for them here.

If this seems arbitrary and unfair that's only because it is. Some of my highest voted questions were subjective. And were actually closed as such. But some answers got in quickly enough to redeem my question. As the response came in people voted to reopen. Doesn't always happen. It can be nerve wracking.

The fact that it's hard to post a well received question is part of what makes it so worth it.

Answer 4

You might want to take your issue and completely reframe it as a different question.

I took a look at your deleted question. And while I don't have dyspraxia (that I know of) I am dyslexic. So I know a little about the struggles of being different. But I think the problem here goes beyond either of our problems. I think this code just sucks to look at.

customSortBy = (field: string) => <T>(sort: Comparator<T>) =>
  (a: { [key: string]: T }, b: { [key: string]: T }): number => sort(a[field], b[field]);

Yuck. That's barely better than a stream of word wrapped noise.

I've talked about word wrapped noise before and the shame is this code doesn't have to be. The failure here is not using whitespace to effectively highlight the structure of this code.

Typescript ignores whitespace. Which means it exists for humans only. As a human you should use it and demand it when needed. I think it's needed here.

customSortBy = 
  (field: string) => 
  <T>(sort: Comparator<T>) =>
  (a: { [key: string]: T }, 
   b: { [key: string]: T }): number => 
  sort(a[field], b[field])
;

That's a first pass by someone who actually hasn't touched typescript before. My point is, even without mastery of typescript I can say that code was written without enough care for how hard it is to read. It's not just you.

Now it may be the shop that wrote it is suffering under some ridiculous standards / style guide or worse a code formatter that people blindly cling to so they never have to make a judgement call. But no academic paper will save you from these people. You have to make them actually care. That's about being human. Not about being right.

But don't take my word for it. Turn this into a question about how to deal with this problem. Hell maybe a paper about this exists. But rather than demand a paper ask about this problem and see what the community says. We may surprise you in a good way.

Keep in mind we don't help with writing code. That's a Stack Overflow thing. But issues like how to layout code to make it readable, how to put those ideas in a style guide, or how to ensure code is readable in a peer review, are the sorts of things we deal with. We focus on the development process.

We even have a sister site dedicated to Code Reviews. Consider them if you have a large chunk of working code and you want an outside review.

In short, please try again. Failure is an excellent teacher if you don't let it keep you down.