Stackoverflow.com and Perl
A couple of weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised by being 10th person to receive a Perl badge on Stackoverflow
Slipping in at number 10 with such other celebrated Perl names if indeed an honour. *blush*
Of course none of this will mean a jot if you’ve never heard of Stackoverflow.com!
Its a programming language question and answer site started by Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) and Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame).
Its very similar in vein to Perlmonks except its for all programming languages and not just Perl and its also Q&A only. So no mediations, epiphanies or wandering off topic 😉
You will need an OpenID account to start but once past that you will find the site easy to use. Just start asking or answering questions. You get up or down voted depending on the quality of your question/answer.
I do feel the site is more approachable than Perlmonks especially for beginners. Its also a good place to start when looking for a clear answer to a specific question.
So what’s in it for me?
Well you can just view it as a game or challenge. Perhaps even treat it as a ladder to Rock and Roll stardom! Certainly nothing wrong with bit of ego inflating now and then 😉
Or you can view it as a philanthropic pursuit by spreading things you learnt with others.
However the thing I get most from it all is that I’m continuing to learn new things. And in most cases its from my own answers! You can really enhance your Perl foo and improve your Perl memory muscles when trying to answer a question.
Disclaimer: It can get addictive. If you have a procrastinating nature then please avoid during the working day 😉
So what’s in it for all of us?
Stackoverflow continues to grow. More and more programmers are getting sucked into it. Some of these are beginners or language toe dippers so the presence of good Perl questions & answers may benefit the Perl community in many different ways.
Here’s a good place to start: Perl tagged questions.
/I3az/
transfixed but not dead! 
Congratulations! I think StackOverflow provides a great outlet for Perl newbies and veterans alike. I seem to learn something new weekly (if not daily) that I didn’t know about Perl.
Thank you very much.
And also thanks for bringing http://www.theperlreport.com to my attention. Looks great… I think I’ll add that to my blog links if you don’t mind.
/I3az/
Stackoverflow might be similar in intend to stackoverflow, but it’s also very different at the same time. Stackoverflow wants one correct answer per question (and rewards that), whereas Perlmonks encourages discussion.
We’ve discussed the difference on perlmonks, you might find that worth a read too.
Hi Moritz,
Yes I totally agree… they are both fruits but ones an apple and the other is an orange!
Yes Stackoverflow is totally focused on Q&A whereas Perlmonks does offers much more.
I have both on my RSS reader and read virtually all posts from both. Difference being I check Stackoverflow very frequently (sometimes more than once a day!) whereas PerlMonks I let build up so can read (and very occasionally jump in) to an already well formed discussion.
I’m a couple of weeks behind on Perlmonks feed at the moment so haven’t seen the Stackoverflow node you mentioned yet… but will look at it now so thanks for link.
/I3az/