Yeah - I guess there's quite a lot of 'bravado' and 'techno-machismo' over there. I get the feeling people aren't posting to genuinely help out fellow users NOR show-off how cool a piece of code they have come up with is. I think they see it that every question answered is an opportunity to show how superior you are to whoever asked it. Naturally you achieve more standing and 'dominance' if you answer (if you can call it that) the question in a way that either puts down or outright abuses the asker... They are like those twelve-year-olds who play deathmatching in Halo on the XBox just so they can scream obscenities down the audio and digitally molest the corpses of dead opponents. Again, colossally childish.

My best pal is the IT director of a fairly large company. He's been programming as long as I have, except professionally of course and using business-type environments like FoxPro and SQL Server. He absolutely REFUSES to ever post there for just these reasons.

Stack Overflow is just not a friendly place. But, yes - I do agree its interface is nice! Although I must say I also enjoy the stripped down, 'bare metal' approach of the monastery. Prior to joining here I'd never had to write posts where I manually marked them up for instance!!! I enjoy that nuts-and-bolts aspect - which to go back to the main thrust of the thread, is oddly more in keeping with the culture of C++ as a language than Perl!!!