###What's a good, well-moderated site that would allow these kinds of discussions?
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming
Quora
Computer Programming topic: https://www.quora.com/pinned/Computer-Programming
Search "programming" topics: https://www.quora.com/search?q=programming&type=topic
Stack site (shutdown)
defunct Stack Exchange site Not Programming Related
In 2010, a Stack Exchange site called Not Programming Related came out of Area51, the Stack Exchange staging zone. NPR was supposed to be a site where questions that were too subjective / broad for Stack Overflow would find a new home.
Why did it fail?
[...] Turns out that while everyone loves those questions, very few are actually willing to spend any time to answer them (seriously), and maintain and moderate them. [...]
Personally, I can understand that when you allow opinion based questions you allow any answer to be correct which may encourage new non-programming users, or lower the knowledge threshold that is expected for users. This may cause these less experienced users to creep into other forums and lower the quality of Stack sites.
However, I don't think shutting down that site should have been the answer. Subjectively and naively, as I wasn't around for the site and don't know about issues it faced, I would think that eventually those issues would be dealt with by voting, editing existing answers, or wiki answers.
I agree with Jeff's comment:
It's strange. To me, a programmers life revolves around open ended thoughts. I know all of the code that I write is open ended. I can always find a way to go back and make it better, or think of an entirely new way to reach my objective.
