<p><a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/400/is-this-question-really-not-related-to-statistical-analysis/402#402">I strongly disagree with this approach</a>.  I think that permitting programming questions here dilutes the actual statistical/machine learning/data viz content of the site.  I see three main problems:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>It creates entire categories of questions that entire categories of users will not <strong>ever</strong> care about.  I like STATA, I've used STATA, but it is incredibly unlikely that I'll ever see it again - and I definitely don't care about how to get extra digits in my p-values with it.  Conversely, I'm continually expanding my repertoire of statistical methods, so I'm always interested in reading the stats questions, even if they're not of immediate relevance - useful perspectives or approaches can come from almost anywhere, it seems.</p></li>
<li><p>It makes it tedious for people who are interested in both programming and analysis to sort out which questions they feel like checking out that day.  I'm rather partisan about R, but I still don't want to see questions about how to vectorize operation X every time I come here.  And what about people who are mostly interested in programming for R and not statistics?  They might exist!  I think a very relevant example of this is <a href="https://gis.stackexchange.com/">the GIS StackExchange</a>, which is <em>extremely</em> technical and is having <a href="https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164/progress-of-gis-stackexchange-2-stats-from-area-51">an oddly parallel discussion on its meta</a> about how not having so many software questions might be good for the site.  Disclaimer: I complain about this same stuff over there, too, so the discussions aren't exactly independent.</p></li>
<li><p>Permitting these questions here encourages duplication of past effort.  Deciding to move all R questioning here means that we're orphaning > 2,300 questions that are already on StackOverflow (for reference, we've got 993 total questions here).  In fact, there are several well-established sources for technical help with R and even specific packages.  The same is true for the dozens of other statistical software programs out there.  It will take us incredible effort to duplicate that knowledge and lure those users here; wouldn't it make more sense to focus our efforts on the need that we actually do address - Q&amp;A for data analysis itself?  This site is awesome because it <strong>provides new functionality to the Internet</strong>... not because it could potentially reproduce existing functionality.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>I think a very easy rule of thumb for identifying where a question will go is to ask: can the question be restated as "How do I analyze X?"  If so, it belongs here.  If the question is better restated as "How do I program X?", then we (helpfully, knowledgeably, courteously) send it to SO or other appropriate resources.</p>

<p>There will always be questions that fall into the grey zone in between (e.g., algorithms for calculating statistics on streaming data or very large datasets), but just because we can't say definitively if a question belongs here or on SO doesn't mean that we should duplicate the entire functionality of SO.</p>
