All of your examples are:
- off topic (clear shopping recommendation without any interesting aspects, e.g. exotic requirements),
- not a real question, since they're just too broad, and
- not constructive as the answers are highly subjective.
Let's ignore these categories for a moment, and see why the questions aren't useful.
Consider the book recommendation (ignoring for a moment that it's off topic on SU anyway). There was a similar topic on Stack Overflow: What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?
Let's ignore for a moment that it was finally closed. What do you see?
A popular, "open-ended" topic that managed to attract a lot of attention. So much attention, in fact, that a single, one-line answer could give users editing permissions on the site. A topic where users stopped answering the actual question, but instead added yet another book I liked to the list and so completely broke the entire topic.
When I first started, there was "Mastering Turbo Pascal" by Tom Swan. There is nothing terribly profound about this book. It was clear and concise with usable examples.
The single most influential book every programmer should read...
The same would happen to your topics. The book recommendation topic will list every book on C++ that was ever written.
Regarding editors...
What constitutes an acceptable editor depends entirely on what you are used to, and what features you regularly use.
It's difficult to recommend something to another person, because you just can't know their preferences. While some features are indispensable to one user, another hasn't even heard of them. And yet both use the same application. What good is one user's recommendation for a new text editor to another?
Without specific objective criteria, what do you consider to be a good answer to a question? The one you like best, the ones you know?
I prefer vi via SSH to Notepad++ on Windows. I prefer TextMate on OS X to both vi in Terminal, or MacVim. I haven't figured that one out yet. What editor would you recommend to me?
A topic about editors will be dominated by the usual suspects everybody knows, while there's also three pages of editors almost nobody ever heard about. As soon as another editor comes out, someone will append that one to the list. It will look like a Google search results page or Wikipedia list of text editors (except that the feature comparison tables will be missing, and the ordering is rather arbitrary). Late entries will have no chance to get to the top, even they are are popular and almost perfect for almost everybody.
Even if the state of the art changes, the same topic with the same old, now perhaps obsolete recommendations is still around, with new entries having to chance to rise to the top. What do you mean, the top 10 popular recommendation don't cover C++11? Time to open a new recommendation topic with implied requirements that change over time. PHP6? HTML5/Canvas? Nope, you're still building your web pages using tables and you better like it.
It's really easy to research programming books, text editors, or graphics editors on the web. A simple Google search produces dozens of viable results very quickly. SU is not an encyclopedia of top lists related to computers, and those topics wouldn't add anything to the site.
What adds value are specific questions. Questions that cannot be easily solved otherwise, questions that require in-depth knowledge. Questions that aren't answered by posting "Notepad++" or "Stroustrup".
So if you need a PHP5 (!) editor that has project-wide function and class name completion, some way to quickly find and open files that are part of the project by a substring of the file name, and needs to work on Linux and Windows, asking for that might work.
But your examples are too broad in scope, and too subjective to be of any use to others. They might be interesting to browse for someone with too much time, or to find new toys to play with, but otherwise offer little. And they don't provide nearly enough information to allow us to close the more specific recommendation topics.
