Return to Question

Among things that beginners seem to undertake are programming tasks involving playing cards. (They come up in a lot of school assignments, but it seems people are equally enthusiastic about trying it independently.)

Noticing that a lot of basic questions were asked repeatedly, I thought perhaps it would be nice for there to be a tag-wiki that came up on playing-cards. It could give people basic pointers and a FAQ, and point them to resources on shuffle etc.

But when I looked I saw there were only 27 instances of the tag. Which was a gross under-representation of the number of questions being asked about playing cards!

So as a little late night undertaking that's easy and also part of getting rid of the homework tag, I thought I'd do my part to find questions that were related to data structures...card suits...and printing and shuffling decks. All the things people do with cards, basically. But someone challenged my choice to add it to this question:

Sicstus Prolog: Deck of Cards Query

(Note: His comment there was deleted once I pointed him to this post, so we could continue the discussion here on meta.)

My view is that it is a good tag to use, to enable browsing. If someone is trying to do something with cards in java, then being able to query on both [java] [playing-cards] (for instance) seems to me like it would be tremendously useful. They can branch out and survey the various related issues that come up, due to the visibility the tag (and its tag wiki) would provide.

If the tag is considered not a good idea at all (and why it had so few uses) I would ask the question of whether that calls tic-tac-toe into question as well? I think that if a question is narrowly about "2D arrays" or such then it probably doesn't need to be phrased in "tic-tac-toe" terms, but if it is then the label seems to be appropriate and useful.

I'd added enough instances of the tag to give some flavor of what it would be like if it were bigger (though there are many more to find). It brings up a couple of edge cases we might study, like someone asking about how to get the right symbols for card suits in HTML:

Special characters in HTML

This is an example of one of the things that might come up in a list with [html] [playing-cards] and let people quickly speed ahead with their learning. This is where I'm talking about the discovery angle: if someone is developing a playing-card related game in HTML and finds this particular issue, then seeing the tag they might browse into it and get some questions answered they hadn't thought about asking yet (but eventually would, and would be redundant).

When should these types of questions be moved to the Game Development site?

Among things that beginners seem to undertake are programming tasks involving playing cards. (They come up in a lot of school assignments, but it seems people are equally enthusiastic about trying it independently.)

Noticing that a lot of basic questions were asked repeatedly, I thought perhaps it would be nice for there to be a tag-wiki that came up on playing-cards. It could give people basic pointers and a FAQ, and point them to resources on shuffle etc.

But when I looked I saw there were only 27 instances of the tag. Which was a gross under-representation of the number of questions being asked about playing cards!

So as a little late night undertaking that's easy and also part of getting rid of the homework tag, I thought I'd do my part to find questions that were related to data structures...card suits...and printing and shuffling decks. All the things people do with cards, basically. But someone challenged my choice to add it to this question:

Sicstus Prolog: Deck of Cards Query

(Note: His comment there was deleted once I pointed him to this post, so we could continue the discussion here on meta.)

My view is that it is a good tag to use, to enable browsing. If someone is trying to do something with cards in java, then being able to query on both [java] [playing-cards] (for instance) seems to me like it would be tremendously useful. They can branch out and survey the various related issues that come up, due to the visibility the tag (and its tag wiki) would provide.

If the tag is considered not a good idea at all (and why it had so few uses) I would ask the question of whether that calls tic-tac-toe into question as well? I think that if a question is narrowly about "2D arrays" or such then it probably doesn't need to be phrased in "tic-tac-toe" terms, but if it is then the label seems to be appropriate and useful.

I'd added enough instances of the tag to give some flavor of what it would be like if it were bigger (though there are many more to find). It brings up a couple of edge cases we might study, like someone asking about how to get the right symbols for card suits in HTML:

Special characters in HTML

This is an example of one of the things that might come up in a list with [html] [playing-cards] and let people quickly speed ahead with their learning. This is where I'm talking about the discovery angle: if someone is developing a playing-card related game in HTML and finds this particular issue, then seeing the tag they might browse into it and get some questions answered they hadn't thought about asking yet (but eventually would, and would be redundant).

When should these types of questions be moved to the Game Development site?

Among things that beginners seem to undertake are programming tasks involving playing cards. (They come up in a lot of school assignments, but it seems people are equally enthusiastic about trying it independently.)

Noticing that a lot of basic questions were asked repeatedly, I thought perhaps it would be nice for there to be a tag-wiki that came up on playing-cards. It could give people basic pointers and a FAQ, and point them to resources on shuffle etc.

But when I looked I saw there were only 27 instances of the tag. Which was a gross under-representation of the number of questions being asked about playing cards!

So as a little late night undertaking that's easy and also part of getting rid of the homework tag, I thought I'd do my part to find questions that were related to data structures...card suits...and printing and shuffling decks. All the things people do with cards, basically. But someone challenged my choice to add it to this question:

Sicstus Prolog: Deck of Cards Query

(Note: His comment there was deleted once I pointed him to this post, so we could continue the discussion here on meta.)

My view is that it is a good tag to use, to enable browsing. If someone is trying to do something with cards in java, then being able to query on both [java] [playing-cards] (for instance) seems to me like it would be tremendously useful. They can branch out and survey the various related issues that come up, due to the discover-ability the tag (and its tag wiki) would provide.

If the tag is considered not a good idea at all (and why it had so few uses) I would ask the question of whether that calls tic-tac-toe into question as well? I think that if a question is narrowly about "2D arrays" or such then it probably doesn't need to be phrased in "tic-tac-toe" terms, but if it is then the label seems to be appropriate and useful.

I'd added enough instances of the tag to give some flavor of what it would be like if it were bigger (though there are many more to find). It brings up a couple of edge cases we might study, like someone asking about how to get the right symbols for card suits in HTML:

Special characters in HTML

This is an example of one of the things that might come up in a list with [html] [playing-cards] and let people quickly speed ahead with their learning. This is where I'm talking about the discovery angle: if someone is developing a playing-card related game in HTML and finds this particular issue, then seeing the tag they might browse into it and get some questions answered they hadn't thought about asking yet (but eventually would, and would be redundant).

When should these types of questions be moved to the Game Development site?

Among things that beginners seem to undertake are programming tasks involving playing cards. (They come up in a lot of school assignments, but it seems people are equally enthusiastic about trying it independently.)

Noticing that a lot of basic questions were asked repeatedly, I thought perhaps it would be nice for there to be a tag-wiki that came up on playing-cards. It could give people basic pointers and a FAQ, and point them to resources on shuffle etc.

But when I looked I saw there were only 27 instances of the tag. Which was a gross under-representation of the number of questions being asked about playing cards!

So as a little late night undertaking that's easy and also part of getting rid of the homework tag, I thought I'd do my part to find questions that were related to data structures...card suits...and printing and shuffling decks. All the things people do with cards, basically. But someone challenged my choice to add it to this question:

Sicstus Prolog: Deck of Cards Query

(Note: His comment there was deleted once I pointed him to this post, so we could continue the discussion here on meta.)

My view is that it is a good tag to use, to enable browsing. If someone is trying to do something with cards in java, then being able to query on both [java] [playing-cards] (for instance) seems to me like it would be tremendously useful. They can branch out and survey the various related issues that come up, due to the visibility the tag (and its tag wiki) would provide.

If the tag is considered not a good idea at all (and why it had so few uses) I would ask the question of whether that calls tic-tac-toe into question as well? I think that if a question is narrowly about "2D arrays" or such then it probably doesn't need to be phrased in "tic-tac-toe" terms, but if it is then the label seems to be appropriate and useful.

I'd added enough instances of the tag to give some flavor of what it would be like if it were bigger (though there are many more to find). It brings up a couple of edge cases we might study, like someone asking about how to get the right symbols for card suits in HTML:

Special characters in HTML

This is an example of one of the things that might come up in a list with [html] [playing-cards] and let people quickly speed ahead with their learning. This is where I'm talking about the discovery angle: if someone is developing a playing-card related game in HTML and finds this particular issue, then seeing the tag they might browse into it and get some questions answered they hadn't thought about asking yet (but eventually would, and would be redundant).

When should these types of questions be moved to the Game Development site?