> you see the same four or five topics come up repeatedly with nothing new or interesting said on them.
Thousands of humans are born every day, and by the time they get to be programmers they must have learned about all these topics. "Coming up repeatedly to them" is necessary for that. Education is one of most fundamental activities of mankind, and it is based on having the same discussions again, and again, and again. You are not supposed to participate on all these instances of the same discussion, but criticizing them for being repetitive is absurd. Most of the time there is really nothing new to say.
I don't think criticizing the repetitive nature is absurd but maybe it's fruitless. My meta point isn't really to make people feel bad about taking part in these debates but to question whether we can get more out of them.
And whilst I agree that new people learning about things can be an effective trigger for rehashing these arguments I don't think all the people who so happily engage in them are new to the argument. In fact I think the constant rehashing of them is mostly the cause of new people learning about the argument in the first place. So in that sense they could be useful (if the argument is actually useful).
Thousands of humans are born every day, and by the time they get to be programmers they must have learned about all these topics. "Coming up repeatedly to them" is necessary for that. Education is one of most fundamental activities of mankind, and it is based on having the same discussions again, and again, and again. You are not supposed to participate on all these instances of the same discussion, but criticizing them for being repetitive is absurd. Most of the time there is really nothing new to say.