Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
"What are the “hidden features” of the DrRacket IDE was closed as 'too localised', which surprised me as it is the IDE for popular and well regarded Lisp-family language 'Racket' previously known as PLT-Scheme.
It gets use in education and industry, and was used to implement the 'Arc' language.
The same question for Eclipse wasn't closed, and while eclipse has a large Market share, Racket is used by significant numbers of users across the globe.
My vote was for "not a real question" as it has been for every one of the horrible non-questions that have "hidden features" in the title.
No matter the intent or the spirited defense that "people can learn something from this", these questions end up acting as a "favorite features" poll: a vanishing fraction of the answer are actually hidden, and most aren't even very obscure.
I'm putting a fake nose on "Hidden features" and taking it to Bedevere's scales.
First off, these "hidden features" questions are hardly non-controversial. In theory, you could have one posted for every single programming-related tool, technique, or abstract concept... Just because the Eclipse post managed to stay alive, do we really need to give "Hidden features of every editor ever written including EDLIN" a free pass as well?
Second, even the ones that do avoid getting closed do so by following the traditions established in the past: community-wiki, one feature per answer, etc.
@Stephen: you may not be understanding that the final close reason is chosen based on the "majority" close reason. The fact that this one was closed as "too localized" doesn't mean there were five votes to close as "too localized" - only that there were three.
In fact, I don't know what would happen if there were two votes for "too localized", and one each for "not a real question", "subjective and argumentative", and "off topic". It might still be closed as "too localized" because there were two of that close reason vs. one each of the others.