Re^4: Should a Socratic Dialogue be attempted?

[mr_mischief]

Indeed. As nobull is often quoted over on c.l.p.misc:

Get real! This is a discussion group, not a helpdesk. You post something -- we discuss its implications. If the discussion happens to answer a question you've asked, that's incidental. If you post a question that implies that you've got a problem finding answers to trivial questions in the manual, then it is perfectly reasonable for us to discuss how to do that.

It's quite clear in my mind that much of the value in a site like Perlmonks isn't in getting an answer. It's in getting people thinking about how to solve the problem. At first glance, those might look like the same thing, but they really differ quite a bit. It's nice that the person asking gets help, but it'd be selfish to count on such a large resource to give up at one answer. The very broad array of ways in which programmers can solve problems lends naturally to discussion, and that's where deeper learning happens.

We should especially be accustomed to TMTOWTDI in the Perl community, and discussion of options rather than a simple answer or a guided thought exercise seems the natural route to me.