Crawling through some backlog of this site, I've noticed that the vast majority of posts are labeled help. While this isn't a problem in itself, plenty of these are beginners trying to
learn the Rustacean idiomatic ways, beyond, "why no work?"
I think the creation of this category would facilitate idiomatic learning for beginners, like myself.
Creating a code review category is an opportunity to provide clarity: diagnosing what went wrong is great, but learning fluency extends beyond fixing mistakes in reasoning.
A thread from about two years ago, proposing the creation of a code review category, provided several compelling arguments for its creation, before falling into history. I'd like to revive that thread.
In particular, some of the better arguments I read from that thread:
To summarize, I think triage of the help topic into a code review topic (and possibly others in addition to this) would provide clarity for people coming to the site to get help, and to learn from others' posts, by disambiguating the "why does blah not work" from "how could I do blah better." I claim the latter provides at least as many opportunities for learning, and should be elevated as such.
Can't we point the beginners to r/learnrust? It is fairly active, and already made for this kind of questions. We can give the help category a default post just like the embedded category does, which will then point people looking for code review to r/learnrust.
I don't think* we want to point beginners at Reddit. The site isn't especially well-suited for lots of back-and-forth, the subreddit isn't run by the mod team, and it kind of has a bad reputation.
* I am speaking only for myself, not for all of the mod team
Seems like this thread got a bunch of likes, and is now drifting off the page.
I may bump it up a few times until someone tells me to stop, since I think creating better learning opportunities is somewhat important.
I recognize that others may feel the thread felt opposed to a dissenting opinion @L0uisc a bit, making for a bit of an echo chamber. I hope others with strong feelings in either direction feel comfortable to make their case.
I support the idea and would like a new category although I think it's sometimes hard to draw a line between general "help" requests and "code review".
I'm in favor for this. Would also like this as a beginner.
Help should be the category people go to when they don't know yet how to accomplish something, or when they get an error of some kind.
Code Review should be the category where people go to post fully functional code, but ask for improvements (in speed, optimization, and Rust idiomacy).
Having a category like this would also encourage beginners to actually focus on improving their own code and application performance, which will result in an even better reputation for the language as well.
Help when you don't have fully functional, bug-free code and need help solving that.
Code review when you have fully functional code without issues, but want to improve the idiomacy, way of doing things, speed, performance,...