I guess my problem is that I can't see the value in providing someone with five answers, of which one may be correct. And giving that someone the responsibility of finding that out.

You think one mainstream opinion that is seen as "the correct way for it" is the way to go? I for one see TIMTOWTDI as one of the biggest features of Perl, because the techniques, tools and strategies can evolve.

For every poster of a wrong or not-optimal answer there surely are hundrets with the same opinion who'd just have thought "Naa, not how I do it, has nothing to do with it" or something else. "Wrong" answers bring themselves into public, where they can be discussed. I'm not a fanatic follower of the Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis dogma, but I think it applies quite good here.

How does that help Perl and its community? Perl is percieved to be hard, and hard to find good information. Sorry, but I don't see any value in providing someone with false information. And I find Perlmonks to be in a very sorry state that instead of trying to improve matters, people try to justify it.

I see Perlmonks as a community where people learn, where people make errors, were new ideas come up and evolve. I don't see PM as an answering machine and am really glad that it isn't.

It reflects poorly to Perl and the community, in exactly the same way as it would reflect poorly to Amtrak if an inquiry about depart times was answered in five different ways.

Again, Perlmonks is not a service company. You'd be right if everyone in here would be an employee of Perlmonks Inc. And to use your own argumentation again, why is it PMs fault that people come here into the *community* and expect an *answering machine*? The community is in my opinion one of the big pro's of Perl (besides TIMTOWTDI, CPAN, ...) and if someone comes here looking for a straight answer it'd would be best for him to recognize that this is not a company selling Perl solutions, but a community that makes the big, stable and proved fundament we're all standing on.

I don't see a significant difference in the result.

This is Perl, the result depends on the context, so calculate it in.
Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

In reply to Re^7: To help not to misguide by phaylon
in thread To help not to misguide by c_chipster

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