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

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