Ok, here's how this went down.
This question has a slight history. It wasn't even on my radar at this point.
It was then reopened by the community. However, two hours before it was reopened, there was this gem of a flag placed in the moderator flag queue:
Why the fuck was this question closed? Moderators should behave like
moderators, not dictators.
Ignoring the vulgarity of the above flag (which is an inappropriate message for a moderator flag on any of the Stack Exchange sites), it did prompt me to look at the question.
At this point, the question had been reopened. I looked at the history. Some things to point out:
- The question had been closed for five months before it was reopened.
- In over three years, not a single edit had been performed, even though the banner had been on the question for five months indicating that it was not a good fit for Stack Overflow.
That said, I closed the question again as "Not Constructive". Instead of paraphrasing like Tim, we'll go over each sentence:
I hear that F# is derived from OCaml. How true is this statement?
Well, how true is any statement? Granted, there might be a way to definitively show this, with references, facts, etc (as stated in the FAQ) but just because you have references to support your argument doesn't mean that it can't be a non-constructive argument to begin with.
Also, this question fails another fundamental tenet on Stack Overflow; it shows no original research.
Stack Overflow is not your personal research assistant.
This is akin to many of the crap questions that we get which are "gimme teh codez" questions.
At the very least, the post could be improved to show references that indicated that there is a modicum of original research into the question.
Taking the second question:
That is to say, are the resources available for learning OCaml useful
to someone who wants to learn F#?
This is essentially asking for a list of things.
Stack Overflow is not a List for All Things.
The standard close reason for these questions is "Not Constructive".
Taking the last question:
What are the major differences between the two languages (aside from
the fact that F# is .NET)?
This is again, asking for a list of things. See above.
That said, there was a time (around when this post was originally posted) that questions like these were tolerated, but that is no longer the case. New questions that exhibit these attributes are closed and possibly deleted on sight. They simply have no place on Stack Overflow.
This isn't to say that the answers might not have value. However, good answers are not indicators of good questions, and that doesn't save the question from being closed. It might save the question from being deleted but definitely not closed.
With all that in mind, I closed the question again. I didn't delete it because the questions and answers are slightly upvoted (compared to other questions and answers on Stack Overflow, 30-50 votes is nothing) and had a somewhat elevated number of page views in three years (10K+, which again, stands out, but is nothing compared to other posts).
Questions are closed to indicate there's something wrong with the question and it needs improvement. No one has bothered to edit the question in over three years. It took over five months for the question to be reopened the first time.
Even after this was posted to Meta, it took over a four hours for it to be reopened. Posts highlighted on meta tend to get questions reopened very quickly.
This was possibly explained in one of the now-deleted comments on the original question about how the subset of the Stack Overflow community interested in this question didn't think anything was wrong with it.
It might be the case that the subset didn't think anything was wrong with it, but that subset operates within the greater context of the entire Stack Overflow community, and by that community's standards, this question is bad.
In the case where we have bad questions which are not acceptable by the current standards of Stack Overflow, we have a historical lock.
This question is not the place to debate this (but if you want, I recommend that you ask a separate question tagged with discussion, historical-lock and specific-question), but it should be noted that even if it gains historical lock status, it will still have a banner that indicates that it is not an appropriate post for the site.