I asked C coding design - function pointers? on which EJP commented it's off-topic and/because it belongs on SO. Kortuk says no:
@EJP I disagree. Just because there is an overlap does not mean it has to be on one site or the other. It is asking questions related to the design and programming of low level embedded systems, that seems on topic either place.
Now the same thing happens at this answer: Absolute address of a function in Microchip XC16
Who's right, EJP or Kortuk?
Any two sites will have their own style of communities, if a question exists on the boundary between the two sites than the poster will be picking the community that better suits their taste and approach.
Function pointers are going to have wildly different implications if you are running on windows and a new intel as opposed to running on a pic10F, which is why asking about using them when related to microcontrollers seems functional and will allow others with the same question, a question I have had before myself when I was early on, to find our site via google!
"There is also the question of where the relevant expertise is most concentrated, and re that there cannot be any doubt that SO wins by a mile."
This is a ridiculous claim. C experts are a very small sliver of the StackOverflow community. Many of the answerers on SO are Java experts or C# experts or Haskell experts or whatever. C experts are maybe 5-10% of StackOverflow [source: PIDOOMA].
On EE.SE, though, probably half or more of our answerers are regular C users. If anything, C expertise is more concentrated on EE than SO.
Of course, you may reply,
Okay, but 5% of StackOverflow is still bigger than the whole EE.SE community
If our policy was, whenever there's a bigger community available to answer a question, we should refuse it, then StackOverflow and EE.SE would never have come to be.
When SO was first started, they would have had to respond to every C question with, "we refuse to answer this because there's more experts on comp.lang.c than here."
And when EE.SE (or Chiphacker or whatever we were at the time) was started, we would have had to say, "go ask this on AllAboutCircuits. They have many more people to answer your question there than we have here."
So just because there's a bigger community available elsewhere (SO) is no reason we on EE.SE should refuse to answer a C question.
Edit
Regarding the comment, "It's the absolute numbers that count."
My point is that it is not. If we want to grow our community, we can't do it by refusing to answer questions until our community is bigger.
If you think a question could get better answers on SO, it's perfectly reasonable to leave a comment that OP should try their question on SO. I've often done this for questions that overlap with physics.se or dsp.se.
But if you say it is "off topic" for EE, that's going further. That's not just giving the OP advice on other places to ask a question, it's saying that EE.SE should refuse to answer the question, like we refuse to answer questions about consumer electronics or the airspeed of an unladen swallow. It's saying that the EE.SE community should restrict itself from answering this type of question.
I think it's important to note that C for EE can be for x86, but is many times embedded. So there is a larger emphasis on optimization, memory conservation, low level access, etc with which many of the C experts on SO are not familiar.
For completeness I will restate what I said in the posts referred to. Both are computer programming questions, and have precisely nothing to do with electronics except insofar as you want to represent that EE includes computer programming, which from very long experience is not a belief that I share. There is also the question of where the relevant expertise is most concentrated, and re that there cannot be any doubt that SO wins by a mile. So asking here instead of there is basically not a rational mode of enquiry and is not calculates to yield a decent discussion let alone the correct answer. The two posts cited are already sufficient evidence of that.
The specific question of different types of pointer raised in another comment here is already addressed entirely by declarations to the compiler, which the poster in one of the posts referred too is simply misusing, in a way than practically any competent SO member would spot in a minute. There are aspects to that question that only a compiler writer would really know, and I am speaking as a compiler writer myself. I assure you that the relevant expertise is to be found there rather than here: so that is where the question belongs. Raising that as an excuse to discuss it here is yet more evidence that the relevant expertise to answer the question simply is not concentrated in this site.
