Should we burninate C tag?

Question

Should we delete the C tag? Coding questions are off-topic here, so the C tag is a "broken window" that might be misleading posters into thinking it's OK to post a coding question or post their C source code.

Looking through the questions tagged C, most of them are bad questions that aren't not appropriate here. The majority are closed. I count only three questions with the c tag that are not problematic:

• Is the Syntax of C Language completely defined by CFGs?

• Why do negative array indices make sense?

• Find the index of minimum number that is greater than key given of a sorted array, does these two functions return same result?

All of these would be fine without the c tag; they have other tags that are fine. Also, the third question doesn't have anything to do with C, so a C tag is useless here (the only relationship is that the poster included some C source code; however, our policy says people aren't supposed to do that -- they're supposed to use pseudocode -- so losing the C tag from the third question will be no loss).

The potential benefit is that maybe it eliminates one signpost that might be misleading posters. I have no idea whether it will actually help or not, but it's something we could try.

Earlier, I tried writing a tag wiki excerpt stating very clearly that programming questions are off-topic here, but it doesn't seem to have solved the problem, hence my question about deletion.

So, should we delete the C tag? (i.e., remove it from every question currently tagged c, and let the tag be auto-deleted) Should we blacklist it?

Answer 1

Once again, no. This suggestion has all the hallmarks of “we must do something, this is something, so let's do it”.

If there was no c tag then askers would use some other tag, such as programming-languages, or algorithm, or complexity (because the homework exercise is hard, i.e. complex — don't laugh, I've seen it often). Hell, even though we have a c tag, C questions don't always use it! It's hard to evaluate because the amount of programming questions we get in a given programming language is heavily dependent on the popularity of the language among askers (mainly CS/programming students), but I don't get the impression that we get, say, more Java (java) questions than C# (no tag) questions, in proportion with the potential demand. (C# is about as popular as Java on SO, but it's less popular in programming courses, and even more so in CS courses.)

In my experience on Stack Exchange, the argument “there's a tag so this must be on-topic” doesn't come up very often, and when it comes up it's often a post-hoc justification which is obviously invalid if you spend thirty seconds reading the site's scope (e.g. justifying a Windows question on Unix & Linux because “there's a [windows] tag” — I wonder how often Home Improvement gets questions about the Windows operating system in their [windows] tag). Tags are the last thing an akser types, after the title and the body of the question; how many people do you think abandon their question when they don't see an appropriate tag, as opposed to semi-randomly picking a tag just to get the question through? We get a lot of programming homework questions

1. because the askers are in a computer science curriculum;
2. because askers come here after getting banned from Stack Overflow for asking too many low-quality questions.

The programming language tags serve a purpose: they characterize questions about that language. The semantics of programming languages is a domain of computer science, it is on-topic here. These tags serve a need. Even if they caused some harm, which I dispute, that would not remove our need for them. If people asking off-topic because of the presence of the tag was a widespread phenomenon, we could try renaming c to semantics-of-c or some such, but I think that the phenomenon is so negligible that it isn't worth sacrificing clear tag names.