I pondered how to respond to this. Firstly, your examples are not particularly well chosen--except maybe to support your point.

Firstly, the example of "1 + 1 = 3" is so clearly erroneous--real life examples are usually much less clear cut.

But more to the point. There is nothing impolite about "No, one plus one is two."--therefore it is perfectly polite.

The second example, exaggerated for effect I know, is not what I would advocate. In fact, I would read that as condesending?

I thought about posting a few more choice examples (from my persepctive) of the sort of things that you have said in the past. Indeed, I did start plowing through your 4500+ nodes (in reverse reputation order of course:), and picking out those where instead of a simple "No, that's not right." or "No, that's not right because ...", you had chosen to post something along the lines of: <pseudo>

NO! NO! NO! {sigh} Look's like another bad meme I'm going to have stamp down on. Every time this subject comes up, along comes some fool and offers this idiotic piece of cargo-cult code as a solution

That isn't a real example. It's more a composite of bits of several that I turned up in the first couple of hundred posts I read. I don't want to post real links, (though I can supply a few I noted via /msg if you want them) as it serves no purpose to re-hash old ground.

I have to say that beyond learning a couple of new things about Perl, going through those of your posts I did, I think you do get a "bad rap" when it comes to this. I expected to find many more examples than I did. Mostly, I think because I have aquired the feeling that you are a greater offender in this regard than most.

I now think that this impression is probably because as you are a "headline" monk, any transgression on your behalf tends to get inflated out of proportion.

FWIW, I still read everything you write here, and most of what you link to from here. And I can attribute a great deal of whatever little I do know about Perl directly or indirectly to those writings.

As always, I don't agree with some of what you write, but those are mostly matters of opinion rather than those of fact. I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual:)