That's all I'm looking for. Some sort of sense (even if it's "I don't like it") if it gets downvoted so quickly.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

That's all I'm looking for. Some sort of sense (even if it's "I don't like it") if it gets downvoted so quickly.

Perhaps this might help. Let's revisit the post in question.

That'd be described in perldoc base, wouldn't it? Have you looked there first?

The factual part of the post is

That'd be described in perldoc base

Leaving

, wouldn't it? Have you looked there first?

If these phrases aren't factual, what are they? Well, to my ear,

, wouldn't it?

is a transparent shorthand for

, but you should know that.

and serves no other purpose than to deliver a soft-gloved backhand. Thus offended, it's easy to read

Have you looked there first?

as another barb. Barbs words now outweight factual words 7 to 6. Leave off the barbs and you have

That'd be described in perldoc base

Fix up the formatting a bit to embolden "perldoc base", and you have a nice, succinct, factual response with no baggage.

Hmm. That's the problem then. In a classroom, I would have said this with a smirk and a smile on my face, so that the questioner would have seen it was a gentle nudge as a reminder that everything in Perl is documented somewhere, and that since we've already seen the pattern "use XXX" is documented with "perldoc XXX", it makes sense to look in "perldoc base" for "use base".

But out of context, I can see how this statement might be offensive.

Shoot.

I write like I talk, and I try to list emotional content to go along with it. I'm almost always smiling when I write. If you've met me in person, you know I rarely get angry, and even then, it's always at specific actions, not at people.

So what do I do? Stop writing for fear of offending someone? Or just know that people can handle themselves.

In fact, the response I got from jplindstrom seems to indicate factually that they did not think of that, and that they took no offense at my tone.

And that brings me to another point. Maybe I'm accurately reading the state of the person I'm writing, but others are coming incorrectly to their rescue because they would be offended, even though the original poster wasn't. I think that's pretty silly, and a waste of your time. That seems to have happened twice that I can recall, including this one.

Maybe I do know my audience pretty well. Maybe if I was writing one of the others that downvoted me, I would have written it differently.

I'd be curious to see if jplindstrom voted me up or down on the node. You know, that's really the only real vote that matters.

And I just reread the note. I can't help someone until I know what they've already done on their own. I was genuinely asking if they'd looked there and found it confusing. That was my curiosity, and my quick way of asking was "did you look there first?". There was absolutely no condescension intended in that statement. It was completely about needing to know more to help further.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

I'm afraid there's not much more to give you than vagaries. I have personality voted in the past, on you and others, both positive and negative, but I haven't done that in a long while. The vast majority of my votes are spent in a gut reaction to whether I *feel* a node is good or not, based on whatever criteria happen to be fluttering through my brain at the moment. Does it suck, or not? Do I like it, or not? The criteria are always a little different for me; I would venture to guess that the same is true of many others. It's also why I don't explain my votes. This will be the only thread where I ever do that, and I'm only doing it now because I'm tired of it coming up over and over.