I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.
I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.
The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.
There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.
I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.
They are both good answers, depending on what you're looking for. The first is clear, concise, and correct -- pretty much exactly what you want to read and write code with the $ prefix.
The other one is more interesting in a behind-the-scenes way, and goes through the thinking process behind it.
I can see why the first answer gets the most votes -- that's usually all people want. The other gets votes for the people looking for a somewhat deeper answer and are willing to spend more time reading to get it.
It shouldn't necessarily be about winning the voting... different perspectives are useful.
I agree. I am just reminiscing on what came before StackOverflow. How it changed things, what it's intents were and what it actually became. We had alot of people doing their own thing, on their own blogs, creating a community of sorts. But there was a downside that it was incomplete, everyone presented their information in whatever format they wanted, etc, etc. StackOverflow definite did it's job in making this all more efficient in getting the question you were asking answered. But that seems to have come at a cost, it was a kind of harsh environment to participate in.
But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.
For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience.
Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.
TFA is a post from an established developer and showing a screenshot for the submission of an update to a longstanding app (Conversations XMPP chat client).
I thought the same, but then I build a few complicated apps and thought I could keep the different codebases stable but still was a headache, so switched web, ios, android all back to expo/rn. I love that testing is only (almost) only thing now, instead of 3 platforms.
The main issue I have, which is partly connected to writing style, mainly with it dealing with our stupidity. Is that is actually thinks it knows better, and sometimes it does, but often it doesn't and then it keeps telling me I'm wrong and I have to argue with it. Opus 5 is more condescending then Fable, but it still is very tiring. Does fable 5.1 handle this better?
Its about creating a programmatic tool or game that solves something or creates joy to someone or a group. Thats it. The rest is just a way to make to above goal cheaper or easier to accomplish
The single biggest annoyance, same as with fable, is that it overrules your prompt and does what it thinks is better. Even small things, sometimes it goes of a rant of 20 min doing random shit.
And they are so condescending while doing it, it's unbearable. I'm honestly starting the believe the scifi fantasy of AI locking us up, or killing us, for our own good.
I've had Fable & Opus 5, they are the same class of annoyance, write entire test suites when I just asked a simple verifications question, write to production database, deploy without permission, even after deploying and breaking my production API claiming it was not down. Then having to argue & plead with it to listen that they were wrong.
They are without a doubt the most powerful models, but also the most smug ones.
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