Hopefully it's not a cesspit, rather a good place to ask questions such as "which language is best for building applications such as...etc" or "which is the best of the current crop of JavaScript MVC frameworks in late 2012" or other stuff that isn't strictly technical questions with well defined technical answers.
Honest question - do you genuinely believe someone (or a group of people) without 100% understanding of your project will be able to definitively tell you what language/framework is best for building your application? These types of subjects have been debated to death with the general conclusion ending up with "use the tool you are most comfortable with".
Honest question - do you genuinely believe someone (or a group of people) without 100% understanding of your project will be able to definitively tell you what language/framework is best for building your application?
Not the person you were replying to, but here's my take:
No, of course not. But that's not the point. The value is in the discussion and the process, not in any one answer. When you ask a question like that, you don't expect one conclusive answer... you expect many answers, debate, back and forth, and illumination of the pros and cons of various options embedded in that debate. Then you make a decision where you combine your own knowledge / biases / experiences with what you gleaned from the aforementioned discussion.
These types of subjects have been debated to death with the general conclusion ending up with "use the tool you are most comfortable with".
The "conclusion" of the discussion itself is irrelevant. The conclusions that matter are the ultimate conclusions made by the many readers of / participants in, the discussion.
Neither of which have an answer. Unless you want to discuss the fine details of the problem. In which case I'll hire your site to do the architecture for free next time I have a major project.
Questions like that aren't unanswerable. They are however unanswerable without knowing a lot about your specific case (requirements, skills, staff, infrastructure, etc). So they tend not to be QA because they either get surface treatment (leading people to make bad decisions on partial information) or they lead to abuse (people taking advantage of it).
If by "answerable" you mean "have one, and one one, unique, correct, objectively verifiable answer, which can be determined using only the provided information". But this kind of definition of "answerable", while fairly close to what SO uses, is overly rigid and eliminates the potential of a lot of valid, useful, and insightful discussion and commentary.
I understand where SO are coming from in having such a rigid definition of "answerable", and it's their site and they can run it however they see fit. But I see no reason to maintain, in the broader sense, that a Q&A site can't adopt a different position, which recognizes that the value of many questions is not in finding one, and one one, unique, correct, and objectively verifiable answer, but is rather in the discussion itself.
So I guess what I'm saying is... SO has it's place, but a similar site that uses a different model also has it's place. IOW, the SO model is not the one and only valid model for a technical Q&A site.
