Would a question about a specific feature of specific programming languages be on-topic or would the scope be too specific? For example, asking about the implementation of a specific feature of, say, Python.
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2 Answers
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I think they're fine. Real-world examples are useful because they're... real. Concrete. Battle-tested.
I encourage such questions to not stop at just asking for facts like "what does language do with respect to <X>", but to also go further: to also ask things like "why?", "why did it choose to do that?". That's how you get not just information, but also some kind amount of generalizable insight.
I have some examples of questions I've asked like this in my What do we think of "soft / meta" questions?. Including:
- What can be learned from problems (and associated solutions / goals to strive for) C++ committee members have identified with their proposal culture? (funnily, the question is asking for the insight here, and the "what" question is implicit (what is the C++ Committee proposal culture like?))
- How does the C++ Committee generally decide what does or doesn't go in its standard library? (which doesn't go very deep in "why?" (I intentionally left that for another Q&A that I might ask in the future to avoid getting too broad for this question), but it's still seeking insight in the "how" and "decide" parts of the question)
- I've got a (planned but not yet asked) series of Q&A about what the creators of specific well-known, well-established, and fairly mature languages regret about the design of their own languages, why, and what they would do differently given the chance.
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Absolutely, a very large portion of our questions are about that.
