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Ask HN: Where should one go to discuss the higher topics of CS/programming?

by olliesaunders on 11/3/13, 6:21 PM with 7 comments

I know there are a lot of obvious answers to this question but so far I don’t like any of them.

The biggest seems to be Stack Exchange: don’t like that because it’s totalitarian and only handles precise questions with specific answers.

Next is IRC which is great except you’ve got everybody in one big room all talking over each other and it keeps interrupting you because it is realtime and not offline.

Mailing lists seem to be full of good programmers but I don’t really like the way everything is delivered to you to be stored locally and there’s no distinction between conversations you are involved in and the rest. On a busy mailing list that is a big problem. This seems to just be an interface problem so maybe there is a good client for mailing lists out there?

Then there’s newsgroups. My ISP doesn’t provide newsgroup servers any more so I have to pay to access these now. And aren’t they all full of spam?

Lastly you have normal forums which are my favorite in terms of their interface but seem to be full of novices now. Is there a web forum for programmers who want to discuss design, methodology, programming language design, computer science, etc.? Or has that era of the Internet ended now?

  • by hga on 11/3/13, 8:02 PM

    There are mailing list clients that will (try to) thread conversations for you. The Google Groups based ones display that way, you can (generally) read them without signing up. And doesn't Gmail attempt to thread conversations? Nothing says you have to use one mailbox for everything ... I use three, a main Fastmail one, a backup Hotmail one that gets one type of traffic that tended to not get through Fastmail or whatever vendor I used before them, and another Hotmail one for a thinly disguised nom de guerre.

    Serious newsgroups of the sort you'd be interested in should be covered by http://gmane.org/ , and when I last subscribed to a professional newsgroup service, they and the general netnews community were good about blocking most spam. Look at this one I just picked mostly at random: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi

    Don't know about forums, but presumably there might be some out there. Spend some quality time with gmane and you might find links to some.

    Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities. And of course you'll be able to engage some of them in their comments sections.

    Good luck!

  • by kennethtilton on 11/4/13, 4:18 AM

    I mind Lisp meetups to be astonishingly good: http://lisp.meetup.com/

    I imagine meetups for other languages are proportionately as good relative to how little they fall short of Lisp as a language. :)

  • by memracom on 11/6/13, 8:23 PM

    Seems to me that your question is quite precise and that you are asking for specific answers.

    So why did you post it here rather than on http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ ??? According to you it is the perfect place to find venues for discussing CS topics.