I am relatively new to Code Review, so I don't know if this Stack Exchange site suffers particularly from counter-productive interaction by negatively critical senior users but I'm certainly seeing it with the last question I asked.
I asked a question, 3 days ago, about how best to structure PHP arrays:
What's the best way to tidy up a PHP array with both indexed entries and associative entries?
Over the course of the first two days, lots of positive interaction:
- the question attracted one upvote and three answers
- two out of three of those answers received upvotes
- one of the three answers was then accepted
So far, so positive. This looks to me like a Stack Exchange site working exactly as it is supposed to.
Since then (and I stress, since I accepted one of the three answers):
- the question has been argued with
- the question has been closed
- the question has been downvoted (it now has a negative score)
It is really no wonder, is it, that Stack Exchange struggles to make new users feel welcome? This feels exactly like a bunch of clique-identifying bullies with a petty sense of ego-driven ownership ganging up to maintain the conservative norms of "their Stack Exchange site."
The question enquired as to how a PHP array with mixed-type entries ought to be structured and how it could be restructured most efficiently.
In my question, I gave my perspective on an improved structure and gave my working code on how to get to that improved structure.
Those who answered my question responded to the question intelligently and thoughtfully. At the point where I accepted one of those answers, everything was done and dusted, I thought.
And yet we have people who come along subsequently, and have nothing better to do with their time than to interact negatively and cause nothing but needless trouble. Why?
I have had to explicitly point out that in the Help Center FAQ for Code Review, users are recommended to ask about "Application of best practices and design pattern usage".
This was a - pretty elementary - question about the best practices of structuring arrays in PHP.
Perhaps when a question asking for code to be reviewed is asked, reviewed, improved, answered several times, the answers are good and one answer is good enough to be accepted, perhaps (just maybe?) that's not a textbook example of question to start picking holes in?
Perhaps, instead, those who are picking holes are doing so because it doesn't fit their partisan view of what Code Review should look like because something as elementary to them as array structure is something everyone should have learned at school ages ago, and it never crosses their mind that some (many?) users here are not from a formal programming background and are asking these sorts of questions because they consider it important to get basic building blocks right?