Many answers to these questions look like magic to the uninitiated yet they obviously represent some sort of inner dialogue or narrative to the experienced mma user.

I think would be useful for those learning the language to peek behind the curtain and see the sentence/paragraph of English that was then transformed into the code solution. It's target demographic are those beyond the simple introduction tutorials but well before generic fluency.

I realise this is more work by the person posting the answer so it is likely to run in parallel somewhere else, hopefully with an experienced user keeping an eye on it and, more importantly, it is off-topic for SE (as I understand from the comments and the SE tour page).

My question is: does this forum exist and if so where? If it does not, is there any interest from the community in creating one?

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    Are you referring to code-only answers? You are always free to ask the author for explanation. Sometimes code is considered self explanatory but this is of course subjective so many times authors decide to write less rather than more, but still willing to elaborate in case of questions. – Kuba May 10 '17 at 6:30
  • I don't think such questions are off-topic here. This is one example and there are many with "explain" in the title and the body of the question. – Karsten 7. May 10 '17 at 19:40
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    I tend to explain as little as answering the question allows. 1) To much explanation can spoil the learning experience. 2) It's tough to properly estimate at what knowledge level someone is and every reader of an answer is on their own level anyway. 3) If someone needs more explanations, they can point out in the comment section of an answer what is not clear to them and the answer can be edited accordingly or a link to an explanation given as a comment. – Karsten 7. May 10 '17 at 19:50

If you want to parse and understand any piece of Mathematica code that you encounter, you can definitely ask such questions here. (But make sure that you always link to where you got the code from!) Apart from the examples given by Karsten in the comments, here are two examples of questions asking for explanations of code previously posted on this site.

  • Great - I must be just unlucky that I haven' – Joe May 11 '17 at 21:38

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