http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1018830


in reply to Re^4: Urgent help required. Need a code to translate a given nucleotide sequence into proteins using codon table.
in thread Urgent help required. Need a code to translate a given nucleotide sequence into proteins using codon table.

I believe we are stumbling over a cultural issue here.

suchetana, PerlMonks is a website that has mostly Westerners as users. The culture here is to ask for help with something specific: "Here's my program that I want to do X, but it's doing Y. How do I fix it?" If this is the approach you use -- and you seem to be making efforts to fix your code yourself with help from the other users -- then very often people will pitch in to help you solve your problem (learning by doing), sometimes even writing a whole program to demonstrate something: but only when they've seen you doing your work of trying to make your own program work first.

Many of us have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous people who want to have us do work for them without either helping or paying us back, so when someone says "This is my program and it doesn't work, can you fix it?", we very often say "no" even though technically we could do the programming because it breaks the implicit social contract: that people come to Perlmonks to learn how to solve their own problems.

When we help fix very broken programs, it's because people bringing them make it clear how hard they're working to fix the program and take our advice. (We try to give advice first, because if you solve one problem, the next one gets easier - this is why math is taught by doing lots of problems).

When you seem to ignore advice (e.g., "try adding 'use strict' to your program"), and say "please fix it", we get the impression that you are not doing the work to learn, but instead just want someone to do your work for free. When people ask you to clarify things and give examples of how the program is supposed to work, they are trying to get you back on the "helping yourself" track. If you don't respond to those questions by trying to do as the poster asks, this strengthens the impression that you're not trying to solve your own problem.

So I'm recommending you try some of the hints that were made and let us know how they worked; if 'use strict' tells you that there are things to fix, try fixing them before coming back - and be ready to post in detail the things you tried when trying to fix problems. If we know you're trying to fix it, we're much more likely to pitch in and help you fix things.

If I'm reading the signs right, you're trying to be respectful and not claim knowledge that you do not have in front of experts. We understand that, and we know you're not trying to pretend you're a big-time Perl programmer; what we're trying to do is help you learn what you need to know by making suggestions leading you to find the solution yourself (a modified version of the Socratic method).

It's OK to not know this either - cultures are complex. This is my attempt to show you how this one works so you can participate in it effectively.