I was thinking about doing an experiment of trying to learn a new language through Stack Overflow.
[Either Python, Ruby, or C# whichever one has more tags]
I have two questions:
Any feedback is welcomed. [including "you're an idiot, this will never work"]
Rather late to the party (come on, Necromancer!), but I want to say that I've been learning languages partially through Stack Overflow.
I want to note that "the way" (my preferred way) to learn languages through SO is not to post lots of newbie questions about them. The process:
After doing this for a couple months, I find I know quite a bit about a language. Languages I have done this with:
std::vectors and the different forms of using and other things. It wasn't that much of a leap, but now I can answer some basic C++ questions.Conclusion: It's doable, and you don't even have to make an ass out of yourself. It certainly puts the pressure on you to learn, but I'm used to that with programming, as I've been entirely self-taught from the start.
If the question is about limiting yourself only to SO to learn and do research (in conjunction with hands-on programming), then it might be possible to learn a new programming language through SO, but you'll probably pull your hair out in the process. The wealth of information in other online resources, books, or other materials would be just too much to pass up - unless you're extremely patient or just want to prove a point about only using SO.
If you ask "what does if do" etc, your questions are going to get slammed (of course, if you ask a specific detail about it, then great and fine).
I think it would be pretty impossible to learn a language from reading SO - but you can certainly
SO is not a tutorial. The format does not lend itself well to teaching a new language starting from basics. Yes, taken together the questions illuminate a lot of a given language, but there will be dark spots which not only aren't described here, there aren't any clues that tell you your missing something.
That last point is important - without a 'language roadmap' of some sort, you won't learn some basic aspects of the language, you won't know that you're missing parts of it, and that will hobble you in the future.
So no, you cannot expect to fully learn a language on SO with no outside resources.
SO is a great place to enhance a good tutorial, though. If you are already an accomplished programmer, you may be able to dig into the meat of the language, and while going through basic instruction look up related questions on SO to drill down into why or when one might choose one construct over another. You might use SO to teach you advanced topics that are glossed over in the basic tutorial, since it's geared towards someone who may not understand advanced CS topics.
But I'd be interested in seeing someone try. I suspect that SO could become a good resource if someone took the time to put together a series of questions that became the tutorial:
"This is part of a series on learning Python for beginners. Please read the question carefully, and submit answers that are simple, clear and easy to understand. Your answer should answer the question with as much detail as necessary for a beginner - but no more. Please do not post an answer consisting only of links - the intent is to build a fully self-supporting tutorial for Python on SO."
The above would appear at the top of every tutorial question, and you might have the following basic questions (each in its own question post):
You'll probably need to CW the post to avoid the wiki police, but other than that there's no reason not to post a tutorial series of questions, and thereby learn a language while providing a resource for others who might want to learn a given language.
Expect, though, that once someone starts doing this, these will pop up all over the place as others will follow suit. It may result in a backlash from the community (all I see are these stupid tutorials!) but I believe this could be a very good resource for programmers, and a way to bring beginners into the community on a regular basis.
You'll learn best writing code in the language you choose to learn. Project Euler has a lot of (maths oriented) problems you can solve. There are also a lot of online tutorials and books (e.g. Dive Into Python).
If you come here and say something like "I'm teaching myself Python, and I'm having trouble with X; what am I doing wrong?" (after searching, of course), then no one should have any problem with "easy" questions.
Can you learn a language just using SO? No. At least, not before you seriously wear out your welcome. SO shouldn't be your primary resource for learning a language. It is great for clarifying points of confusion and for improving your ability to take advantage of a language.
When you get to a decent competency, SO is a great way to see a lot of challenging questions that people have run across in the language of your choice. You can learn a lot from trying to answer these questions, and then seeing how the really adept answer them.
You can definitely learn new solutions, which will be useful in any language. Today I learned about quicksort when I asked a more detailed question regarding the inner-workings of PHP's USORT function.
This cleared up my confusion in thinking usort callbacks cycled through arrays in a linear process. Granted, I didn't learn a new language, but I did learn a new solution.
