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Certain SE sites forbid questions like "What plugins do you use in PyCharm?" or "How does your zshell configuration file look like?"

In economics, it's less frequent, but what about questions like "What State modules do you use?" or "What programming language do you use for economic modeling?"

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Yes

These questions provide a valuable overview of best practices. They're not judgemental, and personally, I see no negative effects of these questions.

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    $\begingroup$ Then ask for best-practices. "Whats the best way to do XYZ" is fine. What if I answer your question with "I use Julia for programming because it's a girls name and I'm that desperate" - this would be a correct answer to your question, but totally useless on a Q&A site. On the other side, if you ask specifically "What languages scale best", the value of the answers to you and future visitors increases a lot. $\endgroup$
    – FooBar
    Nov 26, 2014 at 23:59
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    $\begingroup$ In other words "Personal experience" and "Best Practice" are two distinct, overlapping sets. If you want to get the latter, why ask for the former? $\endgroup$
    – FooBar
    Nov 27, 2014 at 0:01
  • $\begingroup$ I think that there are valuable discussions that can come from these types of questions, but ultimately I don't think that those discussions belong in the main section of a Q&A site such as StackExchange. $\endgroup$
    – cc7768
    Dec 2, 2014 at 17:21
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No.

There is no objective correct answer. So while those are great questions for a forum (which we're not), or for our chat room, they're a poor fit for the main economics Q&A site. What on earth would the "accept" checkmark mean? If an answer can't be right or wrong, what does voting mean - in particular, down-voting?

Some sites occasionally use their meta for this sort of question. We could do that. For example, Academia.SE has a single meta question for polls - an idea copied and refined from tex.SE. Answering is done by commenting, and by voting on existing comments. We could do something like that.

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