<p>It seems to me that the line between on-topic and off-topic has drifted a little bit lately, and it'd be nice if we could (collectively) re-establish it. </p>

<p>I wanted to second @whuber's point that most software questions that might be off-topic have underlying data analysis questions with two examples:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>I once asked about why the <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/44957/does-spss-rescale-dendrograms">distance values differed between SPSS's and R's dendrograms</a>. It turned out to be something fairly mundane (an artefact from when SPSS drew ASCII diagrams), but at the time I was wondering whether the rescaling had some potentially-useful statistical interpretation.</p></li>
<li><p>I also recall a question about adjusting the priors on a Naive Bayes classifier in R. This could be answered in several different ways. The "StackOverflow-y" answer is probably either</p>

<ul>
<li>"Add these arguments to the function call, like so...."</li>
<li>"You can't in $X$; use package $Y$ instead."</li>
</ul>

<p>However, armed with (a very little bit of) statistical knowledge, one could suggest multiplying the posterior probabilities of each class $P(\textrm{Class}=C|\textrm{Data})$ by $\frac{P_{new}(C)}{P_{old}(C)}$ to manually update the priors instead.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>While I don't want to wade through tons of "how do I import my Excel file into R?" or "why does my NumPy matrix look weird?", I'd personally like the line to be drawn such that these sorts of questions are firmly on the on-topic side. </p>

<p>Even some of the "How can I do this, but in another language" questions may have merit, as some techniques have far too many names (there are probably about a dozen ways of saying "PCA"), and sometimes a term is overloaded to mean multiple things.</p>

<p>Maybe the rule of thumb should be something like "How often would this happen in a non-statistical context?" Everybody has programming problems with things like I/O and flow control, but I would venture to guess that there are very few off-topic situations where someone would care about potential differences between Matlab's <code>eig</code> function and Octave's <code>qz</code> </p>
