Re: (Ovid - stop asking if you don't want answers) Re: problems editing a flat-file

[Anonymous Monk]

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[Ovid]

Nope, read the posts again and you'll see that deriwana was asking essentially the same question.

Imagine the following. I can't find my car keys, so I ask a friend for help. My friend comes over and sees clothes all over the floor, papers strewn everywhere, and trash piling up. My friend says "How can you find your keys in this mess? Clean your room and it will be easier to find."

Time passes and I again ask my friend to help me find my keys. What does my friend see? I've now pulled out all of my drawers and strewn even more stuff around the room. When my friend says "I'm not going to help because you didn't clean your room", is my friend being rude or am I inconsiderate for ignoring my friend's advice?

deriwana was using strict at one point and decided to remove it. Warnings would have helped, but this person ignored advice to use them, also. deriwana was also eval'ing a chunk of vanilla Perl. This person was also asked to provide information from log files, but didn't.

In short, multiple people pointed out that cleaning the room would make the keys easier to find, but deriwana chose to make the room messier. Read through my posts. You will see that I have spent a considerable amount of time helping people out with many problems. Invariably, if I am a bit short with someone, it's because of issues like this (or if they flame).

I will happily help someone with a problem that I feel I understand. Heck, I even help them clean their room. I won't, however, clean their room for them. Further, if their room gets messier after being told why they should clean it, I'm not going to help any more.

Hope that helps ;-)

Cheers,
Ovid

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[Anonymous Monk]

make you mom clean your room

[ichimunki]

Thank you for this extremely constructive criticism.

This seems to be a board just for cgi.pm propaganda. geez....

Geez indeed! We're raking it in hand-over-fist every time we mention CGI.pm here. Ovid himself is simply rolling in it. Fortune magazine has contacted several monks to profile them simply based on the riches made by promoting CGI.pm. :)

What do you really think? CGI is some sort of weird Amway we're selling here? We recommend it because we find it helped us get our jobs done faster, when our job was to make fairly straightforward interactive web pages.

I know that when I first came to the Monastery, I hardly understood some of the important discipline necessary for successful (Perl) programming. If you look at some of my recent work you'll see I still have a long way to go. What you won't find is me complaining about suggestions to program carefully , to implement careful controls (like 'use strict'), and pointers to things that can save me time (i.e. "here's the wheel you are trying to invent, you can do something else now"). Why? Because I know that the other monks are looking out for me and my long-term success as a (Perl) programmer.

Now, I am nowhere near the great programmer that some of my fellow monks are and I'm not always as cheerfully helpful as Ovid is, but I know that for my part I am incredibly glad that PerlMonks exists and that the people here take the time to give out for free the help and advice that they do.

So if you really want us to change, why not set an example by signing up and answering some of the latest questions yourself? If you have a better way to do CGI than CGI.pm, please fill us in!