From the discussion here: Area 52: Ideas for new sub-site topics - #4 by Lundin
I was on “Programmers” very early on and saw how it went out of hand, to the point where moderators had made the site useless. Then I had my account there deleted many years ago, since it was already a lost cause back then - way too many different expectations. If not even the diamond moderators can agree with each other what’s on topic, then the site is doomed.
It would seem that this has to be handled by the “Programmers” community making a much better job of specifying what’s on scope. Don’t look so much at what the technical communities do, but define an unique scope for the “Programmers” community alone.
For example, it doesn’t make much sense to close down posts on such a site as subjective/opinion-based. That shouldn’t even be a valid close reason, given that things like program design are fairly subjective by their nature. Answers should however be encouraged to be backed up with sources. So rather than looking at how the tech/science sites handle questions, look at the literature/fiction sites. The latter encourage answers backed with sources and discourage opinions - but this is mostly handled by voting, not by closing everything down.
I believe that such a community should rather focus on specifying the allowed topics. Particularly if it should allow topics such as career advise, project management, workplace issues etc that aren’t actually about programming. And if deemed on-topic, how should such questions be formulated, what’s the programmer-specific angle.
Overall, such a programming community needs to be much more relaxed than “software engineering”/SO or we will be better off without it.