Re^2: PerlMonks for newbies?

[cosmicperl]

As I read your node, I see mostly knocks against Perlmonks and the people you'd pull away from Perlmonks:
It certainly wasn't intended that way. I'll try to address your points:-

new users' questions aren't welcome at Perlmonks

I didn't mean this at all. New users are very welcome at PerlMonks. I was talking about really, really low level questions like "what is a scalar", "how do I divide 2 numbers", "how do I save to a file". The kind of things an absolute beginner would ask.

Perlmonks is not an understanding nor welcoming environment

I really wasn't saying that. PerlMonks is welcoming and understanding. Although really, really basic questions like the ones I just mentioned tend to get hit with a lot of downvoting.

new users couldn't ask interesting questions, and couldn't answer them among themselves if they did

I don't know how you got that :/

the PM servers and admin team aren't providing sufficient resources

I'm not saying that. Some times PerlMonks.org does run pretty slow, that's a fact. I'm not complaining or blaming any one. I'm putting it down to a very high level of traffic

a WYSIWYG visual layout interface that requires a mouse and a keyboard is more productive when producing a text-only node than what PM provides

I'm saying that absolute beginners would find a WYSIWYG interface much easier to use. Some don't know HTML.

If only newbies are on your site, who answers questions?

The site would be intended *for* newbies to ask their low level simple Perl questions. I'm not saying only newbies would be on there. With really basic questions most Perl programmers would be able to answer them.

What's unwelcoming about the PM environment? What's unwelcoming about it specifically for newbies? What have you done to improve this situation? If you don't know how to improve it, how would you do better on a new site?

To be honest the site looks very dated. New Perl programmers the new site would be targetting are likely to be young students 14-21. They expect things to look at lot better these days. If you ask a really basic or dumb question here you'll generally go into negative XP very quickly. I'd be more than happy to provide a new modern interactive design for this site :)

If higher-level stuff is here and lower-level stuff is there, then what do you do for the newbies leading newbies who confuse things and drive people away from the language altogether? Basic questions about the language can still be fundamental, and new users or Perl or PM aren't necessarily asking basic questions.

You'd have people like myself keeping an eye on things :)

PM is running more smoothly right now than it was a few months ago. By splitting the site, you'd make each portion less likely to get resources than the combined whole. If you could bring a second server and a second set of bandwidth to PM users, why not to PM itself if you're worried about the strain?

There are other things to consider. PM is only one site, it can only have so much reach on the interweb. A new site on different servers (I plan to provide) would increase Perl's reach.

TinyMCE might actually improve a few things for a few people. However, most of its utility would not be useful for a PM-like site. It requires additional complexity in the node editing pages. It takes additional bandwidth to serve the JavaScript for it. The best feature of TinyMCE for a site like PM is the automatic paragraph breaks, which are easy to do in the code for the node engine.

I agree it would improve a few things for a few people. Easy of use for new people. I don't think a lot of the higher end people would like it, but that's just another point towards another site.

The idea isn't to split up PerlMonks, but to support it, and particularly to support and attract new programmers to Perl.

Lyle