<p>This was discussed in a previous thread some time ago, but I think it is reasonable to bring it up again.</p>

<p>There is a continuum of questions about software. Some are strictly programming , some are somewhat statistical  and some are very statistical and only use the software as an illustration.</p>

<p>The current policy, as I understand it, is that strictly programming questions are off topic, very statistical questions are on topic, and then ... there's a gray area. </p>

<p>As @Tim pointed out in a comment, many of the strictly programming questions (e.g. questions about merging files) are already answered on Stack Overflow. We don't need to duplicate answers and people on Stack Overflow may be more expert in this. </p>

<p>And questions that only use software as an illustration, or that ask us to interpret output that could come from any software, are clearly on-topic. E.g. if you are asking about interpreting a covariance matrix it doesn't really matter if it came from R, SAS, Python or whatever.</p>

<p>But I would welcome more guidance about the gray area.  E.g. "I ran glm() in R and got these errors" - right now, a lot of these get migrated. But I think that, at least for some errors and some languages, we have experts here. </p>
