I've seen many times questions get asked to find another stack (usually Data-Science or Cross-Validated) because they're focused on either implementation or coding specific questions which are clearly stated as Not to be asked on this site by the site's acceptable topics. My question is why this decision was made, along with is it worth reconsidering?
Recently it has been asked when this stack will get out of beta? The response was that there is not enough traffic / helpful content being created. Right now, because of the AI boom of the last decade along with large companies placing bottomless resources into higher-level frameworks (tensorflow, torch, keras, sonnet, etc..) making entering this field as a developer very attractive/easy to the younger generation, they will have a lot of questions on these topics!
This increased push in traffic also means more answers. If we get more people coming to ask questions, more will come to answer. And if they're already answering one, who knows, they may answer another, and so on (Dominoes).
The counter-claim to this idea is probably along the lines of: Implementation based questions go against the purpose of this stack which is meant to be driven by theory, ethics, and societal impacts
My argument to this is: For the longest time, experimentation followed this track:
- Learn
- Research
- Experiment (implementation is a subset of this)
- Wash Rinse Repeat
But with these resources flowing in, and open-sourced projects are becoming popularized, we see people becoming ML practitioners without a clue of what they're doing. Using object detection api people can train up a ~SoTA model on their own dataset right out of the box almost and place something like that on their resume. From there, there exist 2 types of people: The ones who are complacent with what they achieved (by just using others' code on their data) or the ones that start to think, How does this work?, or how could I adjust this to also do that?
The latter people I feel are definitely a category of people this site wants to attract (if I've understood this site's purposes correctly). Through implementation, they are trying to understand the process. I understand the counter-claim to this is that questions should be generalized to try to assist as many people as possible, but the number of people this category would invite would make up for this difference (I have no proof/ pure speculation). Granted you want to make sure not to attract questions from the former group (people who just want to use code out of the box and go on their merry way), so you could say implementation questions have to be focused on achieving certain levels of functionality that they are struggling to achieve rather than debugging/package-specific questions.
I.E. I can extrapolate why the rule was made the way it was, but I think it's not taking into account this new, kind of odd line of work that has been born
- Experiment
- Learn
- Research
- Wash Rinse Repeat