I have a vague feeling that there’s a missing chan...

# meta

[Rob Elliot]

I have a vague feeling that there’s a missing channel where general used to be - somewhere where you can ask questions that are about the language & its ecosystem, but which aren’t as “I’m new to Kotlin” as getting-started implies, and don’t neatly into some of the other more specific channels

The Gradle slack has a community-support channel for this.

(For instance I ended up posting this in server: https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C0B8RC352/p1631898218158200 , but it’s not really a server side question, it could be for code in a gradle plugin, or a desktop UI based app - it’s just a general “anyone know of a nice library / way of doing X?” type question.)

[louiscad]

I think a #libraries channel would be great.

[Oliver.O]

I agree with @Rob Elliot. In the past, you could find questions about advanced Kotlin usage in #general. Stack Overflow is probably still a good place for such questions, but it would be nice to have some mirror feed here.

[louiscad]

#stackoverflow?

[Oliver.O]

Indeed it's there. Readability in the presence of code blocks is limited, and the volume seems to high. So I stand corrected: Better have something else – lower volume, more quality. 😇

[louiscad]

The volume problem is hard to avoid, it doesn't magically disappears just because you have another name.

[Oliver.O]

In general, that's probably true. The problem on SO seems to be that #kotlin is tagged for everything and the kitchen sink, e.g. many questions related to Android library stuff. Then there's too many lengthy questions "Here's a lenghty task, I'd like a complete design, please do my homework".

[louiscad]

Communities are hard

[ephemient]

"I'm not new to Kotlin but need help with this thing" questions work fine on #getting-started, at least that's how it seems to me… is the channel name dissuading people?

[Oliver.O]

I haven't looked there for some time, but I'd expect to find somewhat less experienced people there providing the answers for newbies (characterizations not intended to be derogatory in any way). So that channel wouldn't be my immediate choice if I was looking for a more advanced answer. But good to know that it seems to work nevertheless.

[crummy]

Maybe rename #getting-started to #help?

[Zac Sweers]

Moving the kitchen sink to this slack doesn’t solve the problem, FYI. Many people try to do so because they can get a faster answer here, but the community as a whole suffers as a result and that’s why we should discourage it.

[Zac Sweers]

and complaining about SO when people come here regularly asking for the exact same turnkey solutions to specific problems sorta undercuts your point IMO 😕

[Tomasz Krakowiak]

#i-cant-read-documentation : P Maybe we should have more expressive "lazy" reaction and "not-english"? ^^

[mcpiroman]

I often miss a channel where I could ask (and happily answer others) for a kotlin library/solution. Not like a "how do I do serialization???" - such a common, keyword friendly searches we can google ourselves just fine - but higher-level or harder-to-explain concepts. The main value is in answering "Was such a problem already tackled (and if so have a pointer to a ready library/blog post/paper/maybe just an official name to aid searching further) or do I have to do it myself from ground up?".

What we have already:
• #feed - people show their libraries/work, so it's a push way and I want pull
• #getting-started - name implies newcomers but renaming to #general-help would be get closer
• SO - afaik it considers questions about external resources to be off-topic

[altavir]

Check https://kotlin.link/

[mcpiroman]

Yeah, https://kamp.petuska.dev/ is even more complete. They are all good when I can come up with sensible keywords but not when I have some, usually more abstract, concept to describe.