Re^3: Put some of the posting guidelines directly above the posting form:

[ww]

Please substantiate the two unsupported assertions you make in...

"but most people posting here are intermediate-level Perl programmers and will learn more and faster by reading through a finished solution than by being told to go look at x, y, z modules

and, please provide objective support for the value judgment you offer in...

"it just seems lazy for people who know the answer to reply with module links rather than taking the time to code a short solution...."

I can't provide any data to support my view, either, but the notion that most of the SOPW are posted by "intermediate-level Perl programmers" seems, at best, questionable. How many intermediate programmers have to post SOPW like "how do I remove a leading space" or ones that are rooted in vast ignorance of the differences among OSen? We certainly see a lot of those.

Likewise, I lack evidence for my disbelief of your "learn more and faster" proposition, but my own view (based, obviously on far-less-than-rigorous analysis) is that too many times a complete code solution is greeted with a follow-on to the general effect of "please explain how that works" or -- worse -- "wow, thanks; that works perfectly." without any hint that OP has done anything beyond simply adopting the solution provided. For more on this, please see the discussion (the discussion, not the trolls) re BrowserUk's excellent point.

As to your value judgement ("lazy"), it's my view that providing a reply with good teaching value (ie, with acknowledgement, for example, that a particular solution may be useless in circumstances upon which the OP is ambiguous) is often (usually?) more work than simply providing code.

[TJPride]

When I say lazy, I'm talking about the all-too-often habit of certain people posting "How about x, y, z modules" with no explanation of the strengths and/or weaknesses of the modules or sample code showing how to interface with them to solve the problem at hand. Any moron can search CPAN for a keyword and get a list of module names. It takes a lot more effort to actually explain why and how the suggestion actually works. And yes, some people will then post asking how that code works in turn, but most of that just seems to be legit confusion from people who don't necessarily know everything about Perl already.

In any case, I don't have to provide a statistical analysis of thousands of posts to support my view - this is just my opinion, based off observation now and over some years when I was first here. You can agree with it or disagree.

[Anonymous Monk]

Any moron can search CPAN for a keyword and get a list of module names.

And yet many of them don't ever do this.