After years and years of being involved with Code Project...

dandy72

Exactly. SO is great when you're looking for the one-liner with the weird syntax you can never get right. CP's longer articles are for putting everything into context.

Ron Anders

I love this place. I come here to read the latest. And I have been helped immensely here while chastised at SO.

CodeWraith

W∴ Balboos wrote:

Hell, it's a family, clan, tribe, village, and occasionally a bad neighborhood in a bad part of town, with drive-by down-voters. A cyber world unto itself.

You forgot to mention the embarrassing uncles everyone is ashamed of and the scary clowns. And the dickheads. (Yes, kid sister I never had, they all look like uncle Dick.)

Forogar

CP is my left-most tab, the first one I open each and every morning before I have my first coffee! It sits there all day, waiting to provide help, education and occasional amusement. I started writing code when all you needed was a hammer and chisel... perhaps a slight exaggeration... but I joined CP back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and have never regretted the small amount of effort I put into it. Well done to Chris Maunder and all the hamsters on your excellent work!:thumbsup::java:

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

R Giskard Reventlov

Well said. CP is the best developer site on the web, bar none. If you need a question answered maybe take a look at CP or SO, but if you want to learn something then CP is the place to go.

Jeremy Falcon

Exactly

Jeremy Falcon

Jeremy Falcon

What he said. :laugh:

Jeremy Falcon

Jeremy Falcon

Oh I don't think it's going downhill (I have no idea), but given the current context of that post it's nice to reminded of stuff.

Jeremy Falcon

Jeremy Falcon

Sander Rossel wrote:

I end up at SO for quick fixes that I need right this minute, but I come to CP to get educated and gain some long term knowledge.

Agreed :thumbsup:

Jeremy Falcon

Jeremy Falcon

Amen to that brother.

Jeremy Falcon

Eytukan

Vunic - Yet another engine built with CP platform. :) I learnt 70% of the stuff through CP. It's a major contributor for my career. I've grasped so much of things through articles here & by trying to answer the questions posted in Q/A forums. And guess what, it's also given me a cute, funny signature :-\ No matter how many great 3D games come up daily and become super popular, I always go back and play this particular classic game Age Of Empires 2. I feel the same with CP. It's classic, I wouldn't even want the UI to change. I've settled here so comfortably. Though I don't frequent as much as I did years back, I'm always lurking around, keeping touch & posting things in Lounge. And mate, I remember it so clear, you took years long break from CP, and then you were back. You wasted years, didn't you ? :)

Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.

Patrick Skelton

To me, there is no comparison between SO and CP. I'm professional developer with decades of experience, but generally I don't post on SO because I'm scared. It seems that no matter how much effort you put into writing a good question for SO, someone will mark it duplicate and someone will call you an idiot for not being a coding demigod. And the fact that there is absolutely no time-out element to their scoring system is absurd. I have questions a decade old dragging my score down. It has been suggested I revise them to try to get a positive score, but I'd have to find a machine running NT and a ten-year-old compiler to do so. I've even spent about two hours writing questions with full downloadable solutions demonstrating the problem and not received a single up-vote. It all feels very cliquey. CP is much friendlier. Obviously, it is only fair that you try to solve your own problems before posting and try to write the best question you can, but sometimes just the act of posting kicks your brain into a different slot and you suddenly see what you were doing wrong. I'm sure we've all been there - getting stuck in one mode of thinking, just needing a helpful prod in the right direction. I've done that on CP many times. Sometimes I will reply to my own question with an answer usually containing the word 'Doh!' and many times I've received helpful pointers from other members about what I am doing wrong, to which I've replied with an answer containing the words 'Thank you!' and 'Doh!'. But I don't think I have ever been made to feel an idiot here on CP. So please keep up the currently open and friendly format CP. I for one feel I owe you a debt I could never hope to repay. :thumbsup: PS - Oh, and a big thank you to anyone who has taken the time to look at my (sometimes stupid) questions over the years!

Thank you to anyone taking the time to read my posts.

Phil J Pearson

I agree wholeheartedly. Thanks for posting your thanks and giving the rest of us the opportunity to join in. I have been a lurker and occasional contributor almost since the beginning and have found it an immensely valuable source of information and support as well as a place to chill a little and find some humour. There's also been some pretty serious stuff in the lounge on occasions and it seems to me the community has come together to support others in ways that have had little or nothing to do with coding. Thanks to @chris-maunder and the team! Please don't let anything here change drastically; continue the ongoing organic development. :thumbsup:

Phil

The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the author, especially if you find them impolite, inaccurate or inflammatory.

Member 10652083

I am only a reader but find something interesting every day. I would also like to congratulate whoever it is that writes the sarcastic comments under each header that give me many a laugh.

kmoorevs

Well said! :thumbsup: I came here seeking answers and found a great community! :)

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse

Peter Shaw

SO - Just completely sucks these days, there was a time when SO Like CP used to be a great place to be, there was a LOT of influential people int here, folks like Jon Skeet (Who Hardly posts these days, he just sit's back and earns points for all the answers he ever wrote) Think is, I don't think it's just Code Project, I think it's all of us, Lidnug (Over on the Li-Platform) that I help run, is only a shadow of what it used to be, many of the really good, community sites and forums, all of which where built on the value of being a community are slowly disappearing into existence, to be replaced by anyone or anything that can give you a quick fix. From what I see, most modern day devs coming into the industry are no longer interested in the community spirit, they just want to know how to fix their problem, right now and give nothing back in return, it's become a commodity market, dominated by consumers and a dwindling number of producers. As a high question answerer on Quora, I regularly get emails requesting answers to questions, 90% of them are all disguised versions of "Whats the quickest shortcut to the untold riches that await me being a software developer" or "I have a project to do, whats the quickest/shortcut to complete it and get paid for it" Code Project, Lidnug, even the MSDN forums are not the shining places of knowledge sharing they once were, we are a dying breed, and it does make me sad to think that one day all this accumulated knowledge will lie dormant and forgotten, the pioneers that built a generation will be all but a blip on the history of the internet, developers will stop innovating (Much to the glee of the Business folk) and instead just be content with stitching together little black boxes, that know one knows about, or cares about how they work, as long as they work. Developers will just become another factory line production method to make money in the name of commerce, and actual skills will just vapourise into nothing.

OriginalGriff

Not just development. "Deskilling" is an accountant mantra: it means you get the same work done for less money by paying robots (or their human equivelant) to do "black-box assembly" work instead of skilled professionals that understandably want to be paid more. That the next generation of products will have to be created by the robots is irrelevant, accountants do not think past the end-of-year results (and their bonuses). And that harms not only the professions, but the economy as well, because with less money coming in at the bottom end, there is less bought, so more pressure on costs, so more deskilling / outsourcing , so less money at the bottom again. And you end up with everything being made in the cheapest place (currently China) and quality generally going right down the toilet. :sigh:

Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

Peter Shaw

Indeed. but what can we do, it seems not a lot, beacuse there are now more robots than there are skilled folks doing the job. Me personally, Iv'e been branching out more and more into teaching and authorship, I fear that in the next 10 years or so, I may even end up leaving software development behind, permanently. I came into this game from the late 70's with one clear goal, and that was to pass on my knowledge, to work with other newbies, so they wouldn't have to go through the same routine of waiting weeks before you got a reply to your post on your local BBS, or having to spend hours searching usenet for that illusive text file that you saw 2 weeks ago, I always swore that I would pass on my knowledge, my skills and that I would help others avoid the pain I endured to get where I did. But now like many have said in this thread, there are many of us with years of experience who's answers routinely get down voted on places like SO, simply because they appear on the asker's radar after a google search, but don't answer the asker's question immediately. At least however, CP is still here, and myself and the rest of the team do what we can to keep Lidnug going, so those of us who do still care, do still have a place we can call home.

Chris Maunder

Mate: thanks for the kind words, but mostly thanks you and everyone else here has given software developers who, like ourselves many moons ago, were just starting and trying to find their way. It's hard. We're strange people. We're smart, a little arrogant, and generally don't suffer fools lightly but the group we have here are the kindest, most patient coaches and teachers I've ever seen. You guys are amazing.

cheers Chris Maunder

Kirk 10389821

Bingo... And this, to a degree, has been one of those unforeseen consequences of our education systems churning out test scores. I was watching it happen at Michigan State. When we graduated we had a Senior Design Sequence where we had to keep our code from the previous 2 trimesters, to teach us how bad code decisions in the beginning become hellish impediments in the end. (We wrote a compiler or a DB or an AI system from scratch). As I was leaving in 1992, they were starting to water it all down, because enrollment was dropping. But enrollment was dropping because the standards back in HS were dropping. Nowadays kids can't do Algebra after graduating HS, so they are planning to DROP it from college requirements??? This is a school system creating dumb robots. And schools were already designed to keep kids busy until they were old enough to work in factories. But now without Vocational options. A huge dichotomy is what I see now. Kids in the Robotics club, and EVERY ONE else not even caring about how to use a computer, or being offered a chance to learn how to type. Literally EVERY kid has a computer, and no teacher giving TYPING SCORES as an extra credit??? Then they graduate from college without ever being REALLY challenged. And they don't think about leaving behind a legacy. They want to coast through this job to the next one. And I believe this is what we are witnessing.