Congratulations Eric Lippert for finally winning the 'c#-language' badge [closed]

Question

Yesterday John Saunders added a new tag, c#-language, to seven questions. There are quite many C# questions on Stack Overflow, but these seven questions have high voted answers from Eric Lippert, who already received the new c#-language badge for them.

1. Should there be a different tag for these question? Should we differentiate C#-language questions from questions where C# is a tool, and is this the way?
2. Is it acceptable to retag questions that way? It does look a little like an exploit, which was undone in the past.

Answer 1

IMHO, [c#-language] doesn't appear to signify anything that [c#] doesn't already indicate. I certainly don't see anything common to the questions currently tagged that would appear to require a separate tag - indeed, this one would appear to require the consideration of a specific implementation...

That said, there is a [ecma262] tag for questions on the ECMAScript standard itself or questions on its implementation that are potentially orthogonal to JavaScript use or any specific implementation of it. So I could see a similar tag ([c#-specification] or [ecma334] say...) used for questions on the C# standard that aren't directly concerned with the use of language or its common implementations. Assuming there are actually questions that would benefit from such a thing...

Answer 2

Having bruted through the [language] tag long ago, I can see the use for having a tag to identify questions about the features or elements of a specific language, or any such general questions about the language rather than using the language. We have a fair enough number of them.

However, I think we are better suited to using a tag like [language-features] or [language-design] in concert with the [c#] tag to illustrate this goal than to create a new tag exclusively for C#.

"Aren't tags that depend on other tags bad?" you might ask, but I would envision this about the same as a tag like [strings]. We still have that as a tag, and it's just as dependent on the language as a general language features tag would be. Nevermind that a string is one such feature/design element anyway. It clearly indicates what the question is about, so it works well as a tag. And we won't have to setup a unique one for every language, to boot!

Answer 3

I created that tag in order to differentiate between questions about the C# programming langauge itself, and questions about everything else, but where the questioner happens to be using the C# programming language.

In my opinion, the c# tag has become meaningless, as a tag. It does not categorize the question, it simply indicates the programming language used by the questioner. I began using the c#-language tag to indicate questions that are specifically about the programming language.

Think about it. Is there really no difference between problem with using alias name in query in ms access (the question doesn't even contain any C# code), and Limitations of the dynamic type in C#?

Think about it another way. Should all questions tagged c# also be tagged .net? After all, the questioner is likely using .net in his C# program. How about tagging them visual-studio since Visual Studio was probably used to write the program? Or oxygen since that's probably what the questioner was breathing at the time?

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Yet another way to think about the distinction: in front of me is the book "Essential C# 4.0" by Mark Michaelis. An excellent book. The first 13 chapters of this book fall firmly into the area for which I intended the c#-language tag. Only when you get to Chapter 14, "Collection Interfaces with Standard Query Operators" would I say you've entered the gray area. Subsequent chapters, "LINQ with Query Expressions", "Building Custom Collections", "Reflection, Attributes, and Dynamic Programming", up to Chapter 21, "The Common Language Infrastructure", move further and further away from what I had in mind. I probably wouldn't remove a c#-language tag placed on questions about most of these, but I would not add one.

Contrast this with another great book I have here, "Windows Forms 2.0 Programming", by Chris Sells and Michael Weinhardt. Even though the examples are all written in C#, I would say that none of the chapters of this book are about c#-language.

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Now, I happened to start off with Eric Lippert answers simply as a quick way of finding questions that were likely to be about the language itself. It never crossed my mind that tagging these particular questions would lead to Eric winning the badge for the tag.

OTOH, he can now write the tag wiki for it.

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I just reread the original blog post on suspensions: "A Day in the Penalty Box". The reasons for suspension are stated as:

There’s only one rule of behavior that really matters, whether on Stack Overflow, or anywhere else:

don’t be a jerk.

How do you know you’re being a jerk?

• Other users react negatively to your posts, posting negative responses and generally causing a commotion.
• There is a broad sense of community resentment over your behavior, and you are frequently cited in discussion about the community.
• The moderators get regular email complaints about your behavior.
• You make snide or rude comments “behind people’s backs”, in public places.

Considering that there has been no attempt to inform me of what my bad behavior was, I have to go by the above. Was I being a jerk? In what way?

I know it's the weekend, and look forward to answers during the week.