Why ask when You can search? If You don't find it, then you probably thought about the problem the wrong way!

I was only ever taught to search. Asking was for the class

I did like browsing the Popular page and diving into interesting questions in the various sub-sites. One sad, under-discussed consequence of AI is that people no longer turn to each other for expertise (since the AI knows it all), which previously brought people together into communities like SO.

I rather liked stackoverflow, and was fairly popular in the electronics one. I never found it overly rude, but there absolutely were certain individuals who were.

I mourn its inevitable passing; I haven’t found anything that worked as well as it did, and the fact that you can get the data dumps is awesome.

Tried using StackOverflow back in my college days and was confronted by a barage of people practically telling me I am stupid fuck in subtle and not so subtle ways. I am sure people on there being rude and demeaning didn't help their case.

There are lots of good alternatives, just nothing that mirrors Stack Overflow's goal exactly. Lemmy instances, subreddits, forums like code ranch, platforms like dev.to, etc.

Right, but there isn't really a good alternative, as shitty as it is. And I don't think relying on slop generators is a good alternative

Apocalyse sign...

Exactly, and the data shows that too. The number of questions were falling ever since the 'game' of the site became being able to shut down new questions with a variation of "this is a duplicate" in the exact mix of mean/demeaning/dismissive that would get the most clicks.

Indeed, they were the OG powertrippingbastards

People were so rude there, we shouldn't mourn its end

Stack Overflow has been nearly useless as anything other than an archive of old questions for a long time. It's a case study in how gamification can backfire.

For me it was over was before the peak as shown. The gamification that got it started in the first place eventually led to it becoming almost unusable for its intended purpose. Instead it functioned as more of an online-only augmented reality game where people worked to moderate away new questions as efficiently as possible rather than actually answer questions.

fail to illustrate what a programmer in even one target domain gains from using it.

I think the main illustration for almost all languages is pretty clear (for most situations) - it's easier and faster than writing assembly by hand.

The rest comes down to trade-offs, technical (compiled/interpreted, strong/week typing, high/low level, optimization), ecosystem (are there libraries targeting your domain, is it likely to be maintained for the duration of your project), personal (how familiar you are with the language, how well do you understand its paradigm), business (how easy it is to hire for it, how good is the developer collaboration story, are there certifications).

All the languages you list have some weak points and some strong points. Because they are all popular and received a lot of development over the years, they are now all a good fit for at least some situations.

Although to be clear, even assembly has its benefits and will be the right fit occasionally.

Fun fact, you can totally do functional programming in C++ too. Actually, it is in the top-right of the λ-cube, making it (in a specific sense) a more functional-programming language than Haskell or LISP :D

Yes. History and adoption matter.

broad range of use, alternative to Perl, R, etc.

Of course. Its in the same category as Ruby and Lua. Hence the question on "getting out of the way", which Lua is much better at and which Ruby surpasses by also making programming easier. But Python was first at surpassing even Perl at growing library bindings.

Python as glue is absolutely a use. The big advantage of Python is that it also has a broad range of use and expands what a single developer can do in cases where time and cost of development is more important then code efficiencey and long term support. Basically quick often throwaway apps to get something done.

Edit: Python is a good alternative to say tcl, perl, R, matlab, VB, etc.

Maybe you are replying to the other comments, but what I am getting is Python is good glue and doesn't get in the way. That is fine, but not getting in the way is little help with any of the programming.

I did you the courtesy of replying with a bit of info about Erlang, even though you weren't addressing the actual point about lack of language features like Erlang's. BTW, by conceding that the argument for C++ on microcontrollers is weak given other languages doing better on that front, you are conceding that C++ doesn't have features to help systems programming.

Arguments are being made for language platform features when the question of language features comes up. I doubt it has to do with people not understanding the question.

More likely just scratching heads to find atleast 1 useful C++ (or any other mentioned language) feature that actually is useful to the domains professed to be "supported". This isn't an attack, I am in this boat too! The utility of its language features seems to be no more than "atleast it is not assembly".

You generally do no write Python for speed though generally the apeed is good enough. You write it for minimal effort of coding plus libraries. Why do people use Matlab ҄and R, same.

You picked out my one argument where you have a (weak) counterargument and then declare there's no other arguments. Does not sound like you want to understand...

I wasn't thinking not needing a runtime is a language feature. After all, needing a runtime hasn't prevented Erlang from running on microcontrollers (Atom VM, GriSP); or Python either.

Basically, C++ and its ilk have no language feature for their purported stronghold of systems programming. Inertia isn't a language feature unless the language has actual features (like, say, Common Lisp).

Neither python or JS are "rigidly" OOP, they have support for them but you can very easily do functional or imperative programming in either. out of those I believe Java is the only one that "rigid OOP" is a fair descriptor for, and I could be wrong on that as its not a language I've used (c# which I have and started as essentially microsoft Java has moved away from that style by incorporating numerous functional features from f#)

What language features do users say helped them? Existence of libraries didn't make C a good language

Hm, except in the way that being able to call into library functions "relatively easily" from the base language was a good way for others to create a bajillion handy libraries.

And once you've got those available to extend your language in any direction you want, you're well on your way to ubiquitousness.

Probably rust for the later these days

Just as an example, neither the C++ documentation nor its sagely bloggers have ever shown why it is a good fit for, say, systems programming. A really neat way of handling bit-level data is actually in Erlang's bit syntax.

Erlang requires a runtime environment, which disqualifies it for situations where you don't have a filesystem to load the runtime from, like developing a kernel or for microcontrollers.
Of the popular languages, your choices are virtually just C, C++ and Rust for that.

More towards your general question: Not needing a runtime environment also means you can use C, C++ and Rust for cross-language libraries. For example, SQLite and OpenSSL have just been implemented once in C, and then you simply have a thin wrapper for Java, Python etc..
If you are looking to build a library that can be used by as many devs as possible, that's a selling point which is hard to ignore.