There is a time and a place for everything. For opinion-based questions about programming, that place is http://www.slant.co/ (not affiliated with Stack Exchange).
It's not quite the same as what you're saying, but there is a "programmers" Stack Exchange now, which has more of the opinion-based questions: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/
I wonder what you mean by 'discuss programming'. Do you mean a place where you can post a tangential comment on the topic, or crack a joke unrelated to the topic, or repeat what others might have said 10 pages back? There are many phpboard like forums dedicated for games, linux etc which are of this nature.
For a more controlled kind of discussions, the current preeminent site for such activity is stackexchange. Sure, it has its flaws - its strictly qna style, is filled with elitist and intolerant mods - but for most questions that are not of the form "how to do X with API Y on platform Z", you will find discussion in comments. Even on stackoverflow which primarily encourages questions of the above form, there are enough discussions. The softwareenginering site is much better for slightly opinionated discussions disguised as questions and answers; so are workplace, unix etc.
you can ask whatever questions you want, and even ask a half formed question and eventually work out an answer through a back and forth
the community is great, and will happily help with the whole spectrum of questions from broad discussions to very specific individual software issues
i found offering an opinion in other peoples' questions to be as equally rewarding as asking my own
i linked to the programming forum above, but they have a bunch of great forums.. check out some of the other ones where you might have, or want to have, an overlap in interest:
There used to be a programmers.stackexchange.com stack overflow site where the more general questions and discussions could go, but the moderation on that has been just as misguided lately, so I think the owners forgot the purpose of it.
I often find myself with questions about web frameworks, best practices, etc. that are inappropriate for SO. What are the best places to find discussions like this (if something has already been asked) or start a new topic?
Specifically, I am interested in JavaScript and Python related threads.
Edit Accidentally submitted before entering body...
Seems to me that your question is quite precise and that you are asking for specific answers.
So why did you post it here rather than on http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ ??? According to you it is the perfect place to find venues for discussing CS topics.
I would like to discuss my programming language, which I discussed 10 years ago on lambda-the-ultimate.org, but now this forum is not working. Are there any other places like lambda-the-ultimate?
That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.
I've had more than one question closed for being too close to a discussion on Programmers. It's very tiresome.
What's a good alternative for asking meaningful questions and having a quality discussion with people who have words of wisdom to spare? Quora? Reddit? HN?
I used to love reading this site, but haven't in a long time.
The only other place I know that discusses PL stuff is https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/. The discussion there's not always high quality, but sometimes there are interesting topics.
Does anyone know of any other good places where PL theory and topics are are discussed?
Future of coding is a cool programming community that discusses graphics C and C++ occasionally. A lot of the focus is on visual programming, end user programming, esoteric languages and no code/low code. Lobster.rs as suggested is pretty good for general technical discussion but graphics on a non-surface level rarely comes up.
For graphics and C++ Twitter is probably the best option, follow some important graphics folks (say Peter Shirley, Angelo Pesce or John Carmack) and you'll get some interesting threads. There are also some good graphics programming Reddits. A lot of the best discussion happens in invite only places for me now, having some contacts in the industry helps there.
StackExchange has a Programmers site which is supposed to be for conceptual questions. However, my experience is that if you can narrow down a question to a few possibilities, you can often get good answers (even better ones) on other SE sites.
Oh, and a forum so people can discuss solution approaches, programming techniques, ask questions, etc.. that would be great. Doesn't need to be anything groundbreaking, just a normal forum
Slashdot, if you don't mind a heavy dose of Internet Meme along with your Interesting Discussion.
There are also sites which focus more on specific topics... if you're into server-side Java stuff, there's http://theserverside.com, if you're into programming language research, there's http://lambda-the-ultimate.org, etc., etc.
And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones and check out /r/machinelearning, /r/compsci, /r/systems, /r/math, or /r/compscipapers, etc.
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