in reply to Diversity

I also enjoy the PerlMonks community a lot. But I think this is a very special community. Other Perl forums (particularly comp.lang.perl.misc) tend to be very aggressive, you-better-make-darn-sure-your-question-has-not-ever-been-asked-before forums. In PerlMonks, I have yet to see a bad flame war (which is not the same as a healthy discussion) or an "old-timer" bash a beginner for asking a FAQ. Even when questions are off-topic, people here seem to do their best to provide a useful response. I like that.

It may be because PerlMonks is young and has a relatively small user base. But I like it. I read almost everything that gets posted, and I have learned a lot since I became a member. I hope we can keep it this way.

--ZZamboni

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RE: RE: Diversity
by KM (Priest) on May 31, 2000 at 20:02 UTC
    Ahhhh, you say this now :) When you hear 'how do I remove whitespace from a string?' 1000 times, you become a little tired of it and start telling people to RTFM :) That is why places like c.l.p.misc and EFnet #perl (which I am on) can sometimes seem hostile. I don't always agree with the agressive manner that is sometimes used, but it is easier to help people when you can tell they are trying to help themselves, and not just use everyone else to 'do their homework'.

    Cheers,
    KM

[reply]
      Ah, but questions like that let the almost-newbies feel good because it is something they know the answer to. It's nice to have questions you can answer even when you're not very skilled yourself.
[reply]
      the ability to cross-reference all sorts of data here with relative ease makes this forum considerably more useful for answering nagging FAQs. if people would just learn to link more often, then instead of RTFM, you can say RTFM or RTFM or even RTFM.
[reply]
        Personally, I don't want to link to the FM, unless the FM is one that doesn't come with Perl. Otherwise, people can learn to RTFM on their system like everyone else. The FM is distributed with Perl for a reason, as well as perldoc, and man. Just my opinion, of course, but I see linking to something like perlop more harmful than good. What if the user is running Perl 4, or 5.003, and the linked docs are for 5.6? IMO, people should learn to use perldoc -f, and perldoc -q instead of expecting people to always point them to a web page.

        Cheers,
        KM

[reply]

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