What's the point of the tag [programming]?

Question

On the main site we have the tag programming, which has this description

Computer programming (often shortened to programming or coding) is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages.

The purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviors. The process of writing source code often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.

There is no usage guideline.

I feel this tag is both redundant and very broad; some of the activities described above have their own tag:

• designing -> architecture
• testing -> testing
• debugging -> debugging
• is written in one or more programming languages -> c#, c++, java, etc.
• including knowledge of the application domain -> opengl, mathematics, physics, etc.

Should every programming related question be tagged with this tag? If so, it would mean that a lot of questions here would need to be tagged with it, perhaps rendering it irrelevant. If not, should we narrow its guideline to a specific activity (e.g. Programming is the action of typing code.)? Or should we consider removing/black-listing it?

Answer 1

I don't really like this tag, but I am not inclined to throw my vote onto the "blacklist" pile for this, I don't think.

I worry that doing so is a slippery slope for similar tags like game-design, and that by moving immediately to blacklist the tag as we normally due for less-prolific tags might be creating a more weighty precedent than simply counting the uses of programming implies.

So my vote would be to preserve the tag, but refine its usage guidelines.

It should not be the case that programming is applied to any tag where code appears, or where the user is doing programming to achieve some more specific goal (that can have more specific tags applied).

I think instead there might be a window for the tag to be about scenarios where programming theory is at the heart of the question, much like game-design should be about the more soft-science aspects of the domain. I don't mean questions about designing the architecture of a system (there's architecture for that), per se, but rather more for questions about the process of programming that might be game-specific.

game-design has a lot design-process questions that I think are really interesting and provide some of the most unique content that GDSE can offer, such as

• How can I dissuade alliances?
• How to encourage players to not lessen their own gaming experience with mods and cheats?
• What is the design rationale behind melee retaliations in turn-based games?

I can see a path to changing programming to be a space for equivalently soft questions about programming practices and concepts. For example, questions I'd consider good uses of the progamming tag I'm proposing:

• Decoupling input from game states / entity behavior
• How do I avoid writing Manager classes?
• What properties should be private, public, and protected?

These are about the philosophy or mindset that should be applied when programming a game (yes, one of them is closed, but I think it's a reasonable question to have in our brave new less-strict-on-general-programming-questions world).

Similarly,

• What exactly is a 'set of states'?
• Are AAA games still made with programming languages?

are about terminology and practices of programming. Finally this question is an interesting cross-section of programming and game design conceptually, and this question isn't precisely a request for a technical architecture but more a query about potential theoretical approaches to a problem.

---

Conversely, none of these questions are good examples of the tag:

• Finding the intersection of a plane and a ray
• 2D racetrack collision bounce using angle of reflection (bounce angle)
• Calculate speed vehicle physics 2d racegame
• AddForceAtPosition() not working as desired
• LibGDX - Image width is not set to resetting to zero when full width
• How are the same items generated with slightly different attributes?

All of these are examples of questions when source code is involved, where programming is being done as a concrete activity, but where that activity really just the vehicle to implement the problem & solution, rather than the topic itself.

Answer 2

I feel this tag may have originally been used in the same vein as the engine tag; in fact, in working through the removal of the engine tag after previous meta discussion, I have had to use the programming tag in light of having no better option; in such cases, I have also been of the opinion that such questions were off-topic, due to being too broad, or going against a more recent rule-set in regards to what we consider on or off topic.

In most cases, the better option would be to use the specific language tag. In most cases, I can see that questions still use the specific language tag; programming appears to be used as a meta tag. I can only see two practical reasons a question might be better tagged as programming; both of which have a relation:

• Questions that are specific to programming, in general. Such questions would be too broad for our scope, or be better posed on Stack Overflow; the user is always going to have a specific language (or set of languages) relative to the system they are using, whether that be a pre-built game engine such as Unity or CryEngine, or a custom engine they have previously built in a specific language.
• Questions that ask about general programming in relation to an engine they have not built, yet. As brought up in previous meta, these questions are also generally too broad; for this reason, we are in the process of blacklisting the engine tag, given that it has no other practical use.

As such, my vote is to blacklist this tag. It might take some time; but with only 572 questions, it should not take as long as engine. We should also keep an eye on new questions, as this tag appears to be more popular with new questions, as a meta tag.