Take this recent challenge for example. There are many languages where the shortest solution is simply *. Likewise, for other trivial challenges, the same 1-byte program and/or function works in many different languages.
Should we combine these answers into one?
I think the idea is right, but needs to specifically target the problem case of built-in-does-it answers.
Trivial challenges invite many trivial answers that are just a built-in. There is an overwhelming temptation to get loads of rep and attention with an answer that takes little time or skill. Some users race to post the trivial answer in multiple languages within minutes before others even see the question.
All this gets the trivial question on top of the Hot Network Question page where a horde of alleged non-sentient voters upvote the trivial question and answers. Some people (including me) think that this is the biggest quality problem with our site.
Combining trivial just-a-built-in answers into a single CW answer is the best solution I've heard to this problem.
This should only target answers that are trivial in that a single language feature basically solves the problem. These are usually one-byte answer or just a built-in, perhaps with some boilerplate for I/O.
It should not apply to answers that turned out identical only because of convergent evolution in golfing. Or, to not-trivial answers that happen to be polyglots because more than one language supports its component operations.
(Another option would be to have this apply only for challenges that get on HNQ, but I'm not sure how practical that would be to track and enforce.)
The only value of extremely trivial tasks like adding/multiplying a pair of numbers is that the thread serves as a catalog repository of the shortest solution per language, which should be aided by including a Stack Snippet to easily find the shortest solution in a particular language. At least the current form of Stack Snippet leaderboard cannot cope with more than one language per post, meaning that combining answers in different languages in one post strips the thread from its only redeeming value.
Also, we always emphasize the importance of per-language competition. What does or does not happen in languages Y and Z shouldn't affect a post in language X.
Finally, this is inconsistent with our recently reached consensus regarding duplicate answers. As it is, we'd even allow multiple answers with identical code in the same language.1 2 Disallowing identical answers in different languages is incompatible with that consensus, and we don't need yet another pair of policies that contradict each other.
1 I'm not perfectly happy with that consensus, but it is what it is.
2 Even if allowed, all but the first answer would probably be downvoted.
Every now and then we get a question which is formulated in a way (either intentionally or unintentionally) that will allow a large number of trivial answers in a range of languages. Especially in cases where it's unintentional (and the trivial answer is an "exploit" of the question), having a large number of duplicate trivial answers is just noise that a) makes it hard to find the more interesting answers, and b) discourages the posting of more interesting answers that don't use the exploit, in a language where the exploit works.
If a problem does admit trivial answers in a large number of languages, this will normally be immediately obvious to someone viewing the post early. As such, I'd strongly recommend posting a community wiki for the purpose before the question has too many answers, to encourage people to just add their trivial answer with an edit there rather than posting it separately as an answer. See here, for example; that's a community wiki that I originally posted (thinking of this question when I did so) when the question was new and I realised that a literals-only solution would typically be a valid answer to the question as worded. If not for the community wiki, we might well have made the thread unusable as a result of 19 identical answers cluttering it up; a single answer showing the exploit is interesting, a large number of duplicate answers isn't.
We can also see that there are answers on the page in some of the languages where the trivial solutions work; some of them are longer, but much more interesting. Without the community wiki, that may well not have happened (as people typically scroll through the list of languages to see if theirs is listed, if there's a shorter one shown already, they may well just not bother).
The big advantage of doing things this way is that we aren't retroactively penalising users, but rather encouraging them to help keep the thread clean via giving a push in advance.
Note that this typically only works in questions which have some sort of exploit (literal-only answer, zero-byte answer, syntax errors being a valid solution in many languages, and the like). If the question is one which is expected to be solved via a trivial, non-exploit answer, then the best approach is probably just to downvote the question and post answers separately per language, so that it can have some sort of value as a catalog; the thread's likely to be unusable in that case anyway, and there's no benefit in encouraging the posting of less trivial answers as there'll be nothing differentiating them from the trivial one but the lack of golfing.
Having many answers that are essentially identical other than the language name benefits nobody. It makes finding the solutions that actually required work much harder. Plus, having many similar answers in a single CW answer has been done before. It's not that much of a stretch to combine many existing identical answers.
Note that I say "many" - 10 or so languages where the exact same code would work is a decent threshold for combining answers.
Some people may complain because they won't get the reputation from their answers. To me, this isn't a problem. We encourage voting up solutions that require work, rather than solutions that just use a trivial builtin. How much reputation do you think you are really losing out on here?
