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RE(3): Diversity (kudra: It's fun to answer basic questions)
by kudra (Vicar) on May 31, 2000 at 20:10 UTC
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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] |
RE: RE: RE: Diversity
by mdillon (Priest) on May 31, 2000 at 22:09 UTC
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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] |
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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
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You'll laugh at this one, for sure. The 1st time I installed perl it was an ActiveState package. I new nothing about the language itself and could care less about who Larry Wall was (I didn't know religion back then:)). The only reason I installed perl was because I needed to learn CGI, and from what I had read it made more sense than coding in C. I had no idea that most OSes come with perl installed per default. I had no clue. Period.
Naturally, I started reading the documentation that came with the ActiveState distro on my NT box. The first time I ever even HEARD of perldoc was when I got the Camel Book and discussed it with a friend. Up to then, I had no idea that most of the bible was inside perldoc to start off with. Hehe, I even remember I was amazed at how may +"Perl FAQ"s there where on AltaVista!
Point being: There could be users out there that aren't aware that they have the FM sitting right under their nose! It would have been great if I had a mentor, someone that new perl or a site like perlmonks that I could come to and ask, "Do you know of a gooood Perl FAQ?", but I had to learn it the hard way. We were all clueless once, and some (such as myself) are still looking for clues.
#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!
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You know, I have to agree with mdillon on this one.
Perl Monks is the single friendliest tech site I have
ever had the pleasure of participating in. You wouldn't
catch me on #perl even if my job depended on it, because
it filters out the thin-skinned sorts like me. It's fine
to say "you should get a thicker skin" which I have been
told, but screw that, I like myself the way I am.
Look, some newbie comes on and asks how to get rid of
whitespace, they don't have any f***ing clue that this
question has been asked a thousand times. If they did,
they'd know where to find the answer. Is it so much to ask
to just point 'em towards a working link with a friendly word?
I don't mean to get religious, but you don't see Franciscans
saying RTFB. There's a genuine community spirit here, and
it has as much to do
with humility as it does with knowledge.
sorry KM didn't mean to offend
e-mail neshura
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OK. please just don't vote down newbie questions or bitch
just because they annoy you. ignore them and go bitch on
#perl (not to say that you have done these things much here,
just that that seems to be your threat).
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