I agree on this. And this concerns specially sporadic users (like I am, to be clear). And with sporadic, I don’t mean people who don’t care (to be clear, twice).
Though I recognise the utility of a chat, which some reasons have been already pointed out, I think there’s a very thin line between this tool being helpful, and displacing the most important discussions in a place where much less people would get into.
Why? Many reasons. A chat, in order to be followed, requires you to be there. At THAT time. There might be some possibility to read it a-posteriori. But, chats are also a faster mean of communication. A quite long message gets split into many. And, who’d read hundreds of messages, which might also be overlapped ? Like, imagine, the same situation as for WhatsApp (or, whatever) groups. After you’ve missed a day (or worse, many) of conversation, who reads ALL the messages ?
Sure, here is not for joking, but still, with discussions like these (not chat I mean), long answers, they remain like they are. And a quite long conversation would result much more readable that if it would have been the chat version of itself.
That said, I think chat can be really helpful in some situations.
Before that, I’d then list: “How do I plot data in Fortran?”, since it is mostly used for scientific computations. Then, some options might need the (manual) creation of some windowing system for actually hosting the plot, to which linking the question: “How do I make a gui in Fortran?”.