Are questions about programming the NXT on-topic?

Question

Are questions about programming the NXT on-topic for this site? I am going to be working on a project that involves programming NXTs using the LabVIEW Mindstorms NXT Toolkit. While general questions about using LabVIEW would surely be more appropriate for Stack Overflow, I expect to run into questions which will be more oriented towards lego-specific things that would not see a wide audience on SO. For example, questions about how to get a motor to achieve a particular task, or how to use a particular NXT sensor, might be on the boundary of lego vs. programming question.

Will these questions be on topic? How can we distinguish between questions that are more about programming vs. those that are specific to lego and would benefit from the audience here?

Answer 1

If you're not sure, my suggestion is to ask here. We need the questions, the site focus will (eventually) help get more and better answers, and it's probably easier to get mod attention to migrate from here to SO than SO to here.

Answer 2

We seem to have been a bit inconsistent in our application of this - back in the private beta, we closed the question Can I write programs for the LEGO RCX 2.0 in Java/C++ as off topic (based I think on the Meta question about Mindstorms), while the similar question asked this month was allowed to stand:

Can we program Nxt2 in C++ under Visual Studio 2010?

I'm loath to close it as off topic at the moment (although I could be persuaded to close it as a duplicate) as it's got a good answer, that is possibly only lacking the OP coming back and responding as to why that hasn't worked or accepting it as an answer - they've not been back to see their answer, and as they're not active on any other SE site so might not have seen that they have an answer yet.

While we're still in beta, and to be honest needing some more questions I'd rather increase the scope to be open to this sort of thing - as a "getting started with Mindstorms" we'd be a good place to start, then it's dependant on how programming specific or build specific your question is that determines whether it should be here or on SO...