Nicely done Russ! I must concur that it irks me to see responses which are clearly condescending (especially when they don't even answer the question or point to a faq or help in any way). Yes, we can't all be babies and take everything personally or feel immediately confrontational when we find ourselves the recipient of criticism... but there is a difference between constructive and destructive. Belittlement of those with less experience (or even intelligence if such could be discerned from a bunch of text on a screen) will not make PerlMonks a nurturing community where PerlHackers at all experience levels feel comfortable to contribute and benefit. St. Wall knows that articulation and expressiveness depend on vocabulary and experience. Just because someone doesn't know something doesn't mean they don't want to know. There's nothing wrong with a primitive vocabulary while you're lerning a language. Let's enter this Monastery with shalom to help each other (and all who enter here) to become better Perl coders... and nicer people. That's what I would wish for this place. TTFN & Shalom.
-PipTigger
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I know when I ask a question, if there is an easy answer in the docs I would rather just be pointed to the Primary Document than to have somebody waste their time holding my hand.
Paris Sinclair | 4a75737420416e6f74686572
pariss@efn.org | 205065726c204861636b6572
I wear my Geek Code on my finger.
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While I agree with this in principle, sometimes the Primary Document isn't that helpful.
I'm not a big map() function user. Never saw (nor looked for) a good way to put it to use. The docs in the O'reilly books *do* explain how it works, but not really why you'd use it. I was modifying the monkchat.pl script and in there found an excellent implementation of map(). Suddenly, useful ways that I might use it became a lot more obvious.
While this wasn't the result of a question in monastery, similiar 'hand holding' takes place. I agree that there are some questions where the asker obviously didn't try any available resources, be that the Q&A, AltaVista, Google, perl.com, perl.org, or whatever. But there are questions that are asked that aren't well addressed by the books or the PODs. When I see questions like that, I like to post a quick code example of how one might do it. Often, and in the case of a recent post, someone came back with better code. I learned something, and hopefully the original poster learned something. Would they or I have learned the same this by simply being referred to the Primary Document? Questionable.
I will add that I am strongly in favor of providing the link to the Primary Document, along with the explanation. But not simply instead of it.
--Chris
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