I think that we should have a new type of "challenge": showcase questions. These questions aren't questions where answers compete for the lowest bytecount, or the best score, they are answers to a specific question that demonstrate interesting or unique features of languages.
A showcase question, in order to avoid being too broad, would be given a certain problem, such as find all primes below a given input, and would aim to show off interesting features that the language has, that wouldn't be useful in a code-golf as they use too many bytes to be worthwhile.
These types of questions can be done, and have. In fact, that question is the second highest upvoted question on the site. SO clearly they can be done well, if not with difficulty.
I'm going to cover some of the reasons why and why not I see with this type of challenge, but if you see any others, feel free to include them in your answer, or a comment.
Why?
- This site is getting further and further away from "only the shortest solution counts" (which is a good thing) and I think that questions that don't have a winning criteria that aren't closed would be the tipping point to becoming a site that is completely like this.
- It would allow for people to see some of the more interesting features of a language, without losing out in code-golf competitions.
Why not?
- It goes against the whole point of code-golf, so much so that we have a close reason that stops challenges like this.
- It could create very broad and under specified questions, such as this
- As they are essentially a form of popularity-contest, which are notoriously difficult to make, this could lead to the same problem.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you thing we should allow new questions of this type?