I definitely agree with point 3. While I can appreciate people's need to sometimes learn thing for themselves, I can remember being new to Perl, and getting stumped by very trivial irritating little problems, that an experienced perl coder could have spotted in an instant.
To a newbie, perl docs can seem daunting and often make heavy reading. Plus which, may students may not be able to afford a complete set of O'Reilly books, so finding a good source of information to help you tackle problems may be difficult.
Just to clarify, I am not advocating giving people complete answers to these 'homework' questions, but the posts do seem to fall into 2 categories:
- "I'm trying to do (bizzare / simple / fairly obvious operation in perl), and have no idea how to do it. Can someone give me some help?"
Generally, the poster gives the impression of at least having attemped a problem, broken it down into parts, having got stuck on one of those parts, and asking for help with that part of the problem.(e.g. Bi-directional communication between 2 clients and 1 server over a single socket)
Such questions sometimes could also just about be legitimate (though only from a fairly naive individual), so I am inclined to give the poster the benefit of the doubt.
- "I need to write a perl script to do (something completely pointless, for instance keeping track of what colour your dogs are)."
Looks like it's been c&p'd straight from a textbook (e.g. Finite Automaton)
I think we all agree that these kinds of questions don't deserve to be answered.
Basically, I think it boils down to whether they are using PerlMonks as a source of information, or just as a source of answers.