Actually, SO's obsession that the answers should contain code ready to copy/paste is flawed. They'd rather give them fish instead of teaching them how to fish.
When you're reading the documentation for a software library, do you prefer if it includes examples for common usage or do you prefer a long list of API methods?
Have you ever used the "examples" section of a man page or do you prefer to scroll through the (sometimes long) list of parameters?
In my opinion, code examples are an important tool for teaching real-life usage patterns.
On the other hand, often the people reading the answers are expert fishermen, but simply don't want to waste their time on trivial fish. If one wants to learn to fish, there are already many other resources.
