I recently read this quite interesting article:
There’s an interesting quote there:
In fact, the public’s reliance on Stack Overflow is probably the scariest thing that happened to the programming community in the past 10 years. Stack Overflow is a huge crutch that stops you from walking on your own, because it’s too darn easy to look for the answer there. And when people stop thinking for themselves, they end up writing things that don’t make sense.
That made me think that perhaps the ephemerality of Slack might not be such a bad thing. Perhaps the fact that answers have a (small) barrier of entry means that Elm programmers have to engage their own brains a little more often might make them grow a little faster.
It also means that if you start seeing the same question popping up, you start wondering about whether the API/tool/whatever is at fault and start thinking about ways to make it more obvious. Whereas if 2 secs of googling gave everyone the answer, then perhaps the API would stay broken forever.