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I agree it's not intuitive, particularly to those not well-versed in the history of Stack Overflow.

For the backstory, when there was just Stack Overflow (and not the network of Stack Exchange sites), there was a large contingent of people who wanted Stack Overflow just for programming problems (and not programmer-related questions, like business concerns, conceptualizing, or lists like these).

So the early Stack Overflow population separated everything into "Programming Related" (on-topic) and "Not Programming Related" (off-topic) questions. When Stack Exchange 2.0 launched (allowing people to suggest new sites), one of the sites that launched in the first wave was "Not Programming Related" which was intended to house all the fun stuff that was now off-topic on Stack Overflow.

Turns out, having a free-for-all site doesn't work, and the quality was all over the place. So it was retuned into being a site for questions about being a programmer or acting as programmer (so, business or conceptual questions answerable by programmers)—which captured 85-90% of the quality questions on the new site—to Stack Overflow's concrete programming (questions specifically about implementation): hence the name, Programmers.SE.



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