The problem is that I consider it unethical to teach something without knowing it well enough not to introduce well-known bugs. It's just bad for the community at large to propogate bad memes under the banner of "helping", because it doesn't help, it hurts.

It's the equivalent to spreading rumors that could harm someone else's reputation without first verifying them from an independent source, which I also consider to be unethical. Why do you think newspapers have such strict rules on "fact checking"?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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update: in response to

Update: I agree with merlyn in general, but I think a gentle suggestion that the author update the node with mention of the bugs and fixes would work just fine. Perhaps it would be even more helpful for a beginner to learn from someone else's common mistakes ? After all, this is a forum.

I would have no problem if the original node had been posted "in quotes", as in "I'm thinking of writing a tutorial, can someone review the following draft before I publish it...". But that wasn't done. It was posted as a done deal, and thus pushed my hotbutton.