in reply to On Two Years of Silence...

I know that feeling. "Just don't look stupid, Jenda! You know they'll laugh. <five minutes of cursing skipped>" It's hard to unteach something that dates back to childhood. I guess that's why in any comunity at all (well almost. Once I was in too much press.) I waited until I could answer a few questions before daring to ask anything. (Trying not to hear my brother's usual "but you should already know that".)

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. (It might even be me!)
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

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Re: Re: On Two Years of Silence...
by tunaboy (Curate) on Mar 31, 2003 at 21:43 UTC

    In addition to the self doubt aspect, I was also concerned about misleading other monks with a sub-optimal answer.

    For example, I am subscribed to several ActiveState Perl mailing lists (which I believe you are quite active on Jenda). Very soon after subscribing to one of the lists I answered a question regarding the syntax of how to 'dereference' an argument that has been passed to a subroutine: 

    sub foo
{
  my ( $array_ref ) = @_;
  my @array = @$array_ref;
  ...
}

    [download]
    That was all well and good, except someone else pointed out what I failed to mention. Any changes made to @array would not be made to the array that $array_ref referenced. The person asking the question did not indicate if they were intending to modify the original array, but if they were my answer might have introduced a 'bug'.

    This led me to decide that I should be more careful in my answers, only answering when I was confident I fully understood the question and the implications of my answer. Of course this being 'careful' led to never answering another question. Perhaps I should become a little more vocal on the mailing lists as well. ;)

    Thanks for the reply, Jenda++.

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[d/l]

      Ah tunaboy,

      Good to have you on board.

      I would suggest that you've fallen into the 'fear of posting' trap (I know this because I do it as well). We assume that the question is posted with all the relevant facts, and that the answer will be used exactly as posted. However, the post should be an example of the problem, and any reply should be treated as an example. Never forget - TMTOWTDI. Which way you choose (and any bugs included therein) is purely down to your choice and how you plan to fit it into your existing code.

      A suitable answer may indeed be to look at this module or check out that link. We all have those 'I know I'm being dopey, but I just can't see this' times, people who answer RTFM or shoot you down obviously don't have the depth of experience (or maturity) to do the honourable thing and say 'err - you do realise that your not setting that ?'. Often it's all that's required.

      Post away and be dammned!.

[reply]

        Thanks for the reply. I had indeed fallen into the 'fear of posting' trap as you say. The quote from Voltaire in one of my previous replies sums up why I feared to post:

        The best is the enemy of the good.

        I wanted to have the 'best' response and since I did not I refrained from posting what might have been a good response. But the thing about Perl is, and this is what many of us here love about Perl I think, there is rarely one single 'best' solution (as you say - TMTOWTDI).

        This is something I deal with in my code as well, worrying too much about making something 'perfect' when my time would be better spent on other things.

        awkmonk++

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