I have the (possibility wrong) impression that most programming questions are closed with the motivation "this is not about stats, but about programming, or etc.", rather than being migrated to SO. Is this because they don't seem to be in the right format for SO (e.g., questions about libraries/packages, or questions which don't contain a MRE)? Thus, an attempt to migration would result in the migration being refused by SO moderators. Or are there other reasons?
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1$\begingroup$ I think some of the reasons are covered in this thread: stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1305/… and this one stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2557/… $\endgroup$– Sycorax ModJan 25, 2019 at 19:30
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11$\begingroup$ The short answer is that most of the questions we close as off-topic because they're about programming are either so poor or incomplete (e.g., without an MRE) that they would instantly be closed on SO if we migrated them there. Questions that do obviously meet SO's standards are migrated. We got flak from SO mods years ago when we migrated more questions: in effect, they have taught us what we might consider migrating and what we shouldn't. $\endgroup$– whuber ModJan 25, 2019 at 20:09
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@whuber is right. When I judge that questions would be viable on SO, I'm happy to migrate. But most of the programming-ish questions I see don't seem good enough. In particular, they tend to lack reproducible examples. It's also worth being clear that a, say, 'how do I use R?' question would be off topic here, and can simultaneously be off topic on SO as not really about programming. That is, there can be perfectly good (and sympathetic) questions that are not on topic anywhere in the SE system.
answered Jan 25, 2019 at 20:28