Warning: Gross Generalisations Ahead!

The problem here is that Perl is historically based in the Unix culture - and that means that people are expected to make a certain amount of effort to solve problems themselves before asking others for help. Because of this heritage, Perl comes with the most comprehensive set of free documentation of any software I've ever seen.

Most 'newbies' seem to come from a Windows background. The culture there seems to be to ask for help without doing even a minimal amount of research. When these two cultures meet, there's bound to be some kind of friction.

You should therefore see the gruff responses that you'll sometimes get as a kind of 'tough love'. We're trying to encourage you to research the solutions to your problems before asking us to give them to you on a plate. I'll be the first to admit that it's sometimes difficult to read that into our responses, but rest assured it's always there :) If you want to see people being really rude to newbies then check out the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup some time.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me