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I was surprised to find a question about coding style was migrated to codereview.SE from programmers.SE, since in the past such questions have been migrated in the other direction. Which site should these questions belong on or do they not have a home in the stack exchange network?

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I believe my answer on the specified question, and the reply of the poster give a clear indication why this question (and others alike) shouldn't be migrated to Code Review.

Notice his ending question:

However, some programmers dislike putting that stuff into the FOR, because they think it's being too "clever".

What is your opinion on this and your rationale for thinking so?

His real question wasn't to review the code posted, it was only meant to be an example. I treated it as a Code Review, evoking the somewhere understandable response:

  1. READ THE QUESTION. I'm not talking about this specific implementation of Reverse. I'm talking about use of logic in for loops. Reverse is the algorithm I happened to be using as an example when the question came up, but critiquing how I threw this together in 30 seconds is not the point.

If I would have read the question on Programmers.SE instead, I would have treated it differently and probably would have attempted to answer on the general topic of for loops vs while loops.

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Great examples in your post to chew on. A few thoughts.

  1. Programmers is less about actual code and more about whiteboarding ideas. So any question with a lot of concrete code (versus mostly code concepts with a bit of code to describe those concepts) is going to be a poor fit there.

  2. Stack Overflow is a great place for concrete code but a poor fit for subjective observations about code.

  3. Code Review is a place for functioning, error free code which needs some kind of peer review.

It seems like a reasonable fit to me here, but it could possibly squeak by on any of the above sites, honestly...

I do not think the migration was necessarily wrong, but it certainly seems workable on Programmers. I would be interested to hear what others think.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Jeff, this answer could (and perhaps) should be posted on meta.programmers to point people in the right direction about flagging this site as a possible destination. \$\endgroup\$
    – user3040
    Apr 1, 2011 at 9:37
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As the moderator on Programmers' who migrated the question I can only apologise if I got it wrong.

The question picked up a number of flags that indicated that it might be better off on this site so I took that decision. Perhaps I should have investigated further before doing so.

If a question does get migrated incorrectly, the best procedure is to follow the link back to the original question and flag that for moderator attention. Explain what's gone wrong and a moderator on the original site can clear the migration history. You can then delete the question from here.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I don't think it was off topic at Programmers. That's kind of the point! \$\endgroup\$ Apr 1, 2011 at 10:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Jeff - I understand that & I'll remove the last sentence as it does confuse the issue. \$\endgroup\$
    – user3040
    Apr 1, 2011 at 10:42
  • \$\begingroup\$ That's ok, I'm still trying to work out where to draw the line myself (hence the question). \$\endgroup\$ Apr 2, 2011 at 23:38
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There is some overlap between codereview.SE and programmers.SE, no doubt, but I feel stylistic questions should go here. Programmers is more about the process of programming, this is about the code, so to speak. At least in my head. :)

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I feel that the question is one of the few that could easily fit on both Code Review and Programmers. On the Code Review side, it fits two requirements from the faq:

  • Specific feedback about...Best practices and design pattern usage in your code - The question is about best practices
  • Make sure you include your code in your question - The question includes a working example

On the Programmers faq:

  • Software Engineering - The question is about readability, which SE encourages
  • Good subjective questions...inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. - The question is phrased as such. "What is your opinion on this and your rationale for thinking so?"

In this case I think the migration didn't hurt anything. It has gotten two good answers so far. Questions like Tabs versus spaces—what is the proper indentation character for everything, in every situation, ever? are completely off-topic here since they do not include code and are entirely subjective. I'm inclined to allow most questions that have working code written to solve a programming problem in them - this would exclude code (if there is any) written to prove that indenting 3 spaces is superior to 4.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Tabs vs. spaces is also off topic on Programmers ;) It's almost the very definition of "Not Contstructive". \$\endgroup\$
    – user3040
    Apr 1, 2011 at 13:43

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