Re^4: Better Days?

[bitingduck]

Where are they?

They're not on looking as often as the people who have seen the questions a hundred or a thousand times.

I treat SOPW as a source for little drills to either learn new things or get more practice at things that should be automatic but aren't because I don't spend all day coding in Perl (or anything else for that matter). I don't code for a living, but on and off for work and for side projects, and came back to perlmonks 5 or 6 years after I first registered to finally ask a question. I got a good answer that has served me well since then: "don't try to generate XML with string concatenation. use an xml writer." (phrased a bit more entertainingly). That was the right answer without solving my problem for me.

I usually take a look in the morning, and a few looks in the evening to see if there are any problems that I can either address right off or solve in a reasonable amount of time. For the ones that are really easy, they seem to get answered by the regulars who don't even phone it in- they seem to have a script that sits and scans for new posts and spits out the solution with the correct substitutions within a minute or so after the initial post.

If you're tired of answering them, leave them a little longer and someone like me might come along and post a response and be less annoyed doing it. I've been programming for years (decades) but mostly for things where it was just part of getting some other primary thing done, often for data acquisition and control. I started doing some web stuff a while back because I had side things I wanted to do, and have used Perl on and off for a while. There's been very little that I couldn't solve on my own between the Llama, the Owl, the Camel, and a bit of google. I'll probably give an answer that's technically correct, but idiomatically strange and you can entertain yourselves by making fun of my C accent.

And the questions that always amaze me are the ones where it took more effort to type and format the question and come back and look for a response than it would have to type a 4 word search in google. Plus the extra time waiting for a response. With those I at least try to point out where in the manual I found it for them.