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Should the book "Types and Programming Languages" have a tag?
If so, what should that tag be named?

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2 Answers 2

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I have a few personal criteria for when we should have a new tag.

  1. Are there many questions that benefit from the tag? https://cs.stackexchange.com/search?q=types+and+programming+languages+book gives 88 results, so this seems reasonable
  2. Does this tag help people find the tagged questions, or the questions that do not have this tag? If the tag is about a book and the exercises within, then this should be helpful.
  3. Are there existing tags that can be combined to get the same information? https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-theory+programming-languages has 112 questions, so this point it doesn't pass. However, this may change in the future, and this new tag does not seem suitable as a synonym for a single existing tag, so this point is probably not that relevant.

So, it seems adding this tag is fine. If you want to retag a large amount of questions, please let me know, diamond moderators can do this a bit easier and better than other users.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes please add the tag. I know some questions are at the 5 tag limit so they can't have the tag added. Thanks. $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Jan 22, 2022 at 18:26
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    $\begingroup$ @GuyCoder I added the tag. The search seems to find this book more often in answers, so this query is a bit more accurate. It seems I have no special tool to migrate these questions. I did a few by hand, feel free to do the rest yourselves, but please no more than 10 per day on questions that are more than a month old. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard Mod
    Jan 22, 2022 at 18:38
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    $\begingroup$ To keep to only 10 per day I am parking the current query I use to find the Q&A here so that I don't have to retype it each day. Query $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Jan 24, 2022 at 8:55
  • $\begingroup$ Since the answers to the question seem to be, at a first glance, "no", "no", "yes", why did we create the tag? $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Jan 25, 2022 at 8:46
  • $\begingroup$ @Raphael Well, I disagree somewhat with that conclusion. It seems that the more important matter is whether we should have book-names as tags. I don't think this is a problem. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard Mod
    Jan 25, 2022 at 11:56
  • $\begingroup$ Query 2 for adding tag. - pierce -[types-and-programming-languages] is:question $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Jan 30, 2022 at 8:23
  • $\begingroup$ Query 3 for adding tag. types and programming languages is:question -[types-and-programming-languages] $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Jan 31, 2022 at 7:16
  • $\begingroup$ Unless I think of a different query or go through thousands of questions for just single tags, I am done adding the tag. $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Feb 1, 2022 at 8:50
  • $\begingroup$ There were many questions related to TAPL asked by a user Tim that I did not tag because he has a rep of 1 but from what I see the rep should be much higher. $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Feb 1, 2022 at 8:55
  • $\begingroup$ Good. While there are some that are skeptical about the value of this tag, we can just wait and see whether the tag will catch on. Tim is currently suspended and cannot use this site during the suspension, which is why the reputation is 1. The reputation will return to the ordinary value when the suspension ends. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard Mod
    Feb 1, 2022 at 9:14
  • $\begingroup$ Today I considered removing the tag from some of the questions if they had 0 or 1 vote(s) on the question and no answer or 0 or 1 vote(s) for the answer. After looking at them decided that some of them are good questions for someone working through the book, but in general not very useful for someone with experience. If the person wants more info or a better answer they can add a bounty so left the tag in place to make the question easier to find and so that the person can see that others too had a problem with that part of the book. $\endgroup$
    – Guy Coder
    Feb 2, 2022 at 10:42
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I will no be opposed to the creation of such a tag, but in my opinion, it is a bit weird. I feel that tags should describe concepts, themes, families of algorithms, etc.

For example, the research on "CLRS" gives 564 results, but I don't think a tag CLRS would be a good idea, because it would implicitly require someone who wants to answer to know the book rather than the concepts.

So and is in my opinion a better tagging than .

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    $\begingroup$ I agree with this. Unless somebody were working through the exercises of a book -- which I'm not sure SE is the right plattform for -- tagging for books is not useful for searching or categorizing content. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Jan 25, 2022 at 8:45
  • $\begingroup$ @GuyCoder Maybe, but then that exceeds the scope of the CS SE. $\endgroup$
    – Nathaniel
    Jan 26, 2022 at 10:59
  • $\begingroup$ @GuyCoder I was only saying that adding a new category of tag with a different behaviour requires a big change on SE itself and is only in the scope of the SE developping team, so this kind of question should be asked on Meta. Sure, we could discuss here whether it is relevant or not, but even if we argue, the final decision is not in our hands. $\endgroup$
    – Nathaniel
    Jan 26, 2022 at 19:06
  • $\begingroup$ @GuyCoder I agree with Nathaniel that such a change would require significant development effort, and I don't think it is very useful. The tag system is flexible enough to support various tags, and the limit of 5 is simply to make sure the tags actually fit. Not every question related to this book needs to have the tag of the book, if other tags are more relevant. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard Mod
    Jan 27, 2022 at 9:42

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