I find it curious when questions with 20+ upvotes and several highly voted answers (such as this) get closed. The community has deemed the question as being valid. It has attracted good answers (again as deemed by the community) so why is it closed?

I just think that the community is a bit more amorphous than what some are trying to force it to be.

For many of the questions that get asked, there isn't going to be a canonically correct answer for all time (which is the goal for StackOverflow), and I'm okay with that because we're still learning about our craft. Depending on when you consider the start of programming, it's a 50 year old profession. We still have people involved in the profession who were doing it from the start and we still have a long way to go before we can say that we truly know how to do this properly.

I don't like the "do my homework for me" questions that basically are nothing more than a retype of the assignment. But if someone is legitimately trying to engage with the community and get advice from his peers, well we have too few people who call themselves programmers who won't even be bothered to go that far. So yeah I'm going to bend over backwards to invite them into the conversation. The more people we get clued in, the more we grow as a profession. I view programmers.se as a portal of stewardship primarily and a repository of knowledge secondarily.

I find it curious when questions with 20+ upvotes and several highly voted answers (such as this) get closed. The community has deemed the question as being valid. It has attracted good answers (again as deemed by the community) so why is it closed?

I just think that the community is a bit more amorphous than what some are trying to force it to be.

For many of the questions that get asked, there isn't going to be a canonically correct answer for all time (which is the goal for StackOverflow), and I'm okay with that because we're still learning about our craft. Depending on when you consider the start of programming, it's a 50 year old profession. We still have people involved in the profession who were doing it from the start and we still have a long way to go before we can say that we truly know how to do this properly.

I don't like the "do my homework for me" questions that basically are nothing more than a retype of the assignment. But if someone is legitimately trying to engage with the community and get advice from his peers, well we have too few people who call themselves programmers who won't even be bothered to go that far. So yeah I'm going to bend over backwards to invite them into the conversation. The more people we get clued in, the more we grow as a profession. I view programmers.se as a portal of stewardship primarily and a repository of knowledge secondarily.