Having contrasted Quora, positively with StackOverflow, I find that Quora is also starting to play the “word-shaping” game by which either an algorithm or a tone-deaf moderator decides to constrain how you are allowed to express your questions 🙁
No idea why they really feel the need to do this. But it basically has the effect of driving out all personal voice, subtle context to your question, potential for jokes, creative wordplay, malapropism, coining neologisms or anything else that keeps language alive and a delight for the intelligent mind.
Here’s my original (rejected) question :
Should I learn Clojure for Android programming?
I’d like to get into Android programming. But every time I play with it, I find it full of that verbose Java bureaucraticality that we all know and hate.
I’d like to work with a nice modern, higher-level language. (I’m mainly using CoffeeScript / Python these days) So, would it be worth me learning Clojure to do Android programming?
By this I mean two things :
– can you write Android apps. in Clojure at all (is the tooling there?)
– does Clojure buy you anything in the Android world? Or will I still be making the same long sequence of imperative calls to the same Java libraries that I’d be doing in Java? Ie. for this kind of application there isn’t much “compression” in Clojure compared to Java
I’m not saying this is a great question. Or perfect example of writing. But it is MY question, the way I wanted to phrase it.
Update : Got into a certain amount of argument about this. (Partly because I’m complaining.)
Here’s what I found myself replying :
If people prefer not to answer the question, that’s their prerogative. No problem.
The point is, is Quora going to set a “maximum sophistication” limit on questions, so that people who are capable of understanding a question that requires three paragraphs to capture its full meaning, are nevertheless prevented from writing or reading such questions because Quora has decided that only single-paragraph questions are allowed?
I think that will be a catastrophic loss. For me because I like Quora. And, I think for Quora, because it will become a less interesting place to be. I’ve already seen this happen on StackExchange. A place where I used to hang out every day, but where I now spend as little time as possible.