CGI is a bad example.

Why?

It's a standard module. It's been included with Perl for years. It has voluminous documentation.

I'm all for providing links to modules, especially built in ones. I'm all for saying "This is a frequently asked question, see perldoc perlfaqn." In short, I'm all about telling people who've asked questions that ten seconds with the documentation could have started to answer that the documentation is available at their fingertips.

Maybe SoPW should pop-up a JavaScript window anytime an anonymous monk or a monk below level one asks a question, with a disclaimer saying, "You have thousands of pages of documentation installed on your machine. Chances are, the first 95 out of the first 100 questions you have about Perl can be answered by typing 'perldoc perlfaq' and skimming for a while. Do you still want to post?" I don't think that's a good solution, and I don't think it will work completely.

On the other hand, maybe it's time to check out the 'Before You Post' section again.

I can't see the benefit of reproducing documentation for any standard behavior of a well-known module. If you're trying to do something tricky with Storable, like providing your own serialization mechanism to handle eval'd code, that's one thing.

If you're the hundredth person to ask, "How can I get data from a web form with PERL!", that's another. There's an example on the first page of the CGI.pm documentation.

If asking a question that is available by spending a minute with the documentation doesn't result in the questioner going back to the documentation to answer the next question, then the answers have failed.

I don't care about voting, but I sure don't want to read a dozen questions like 'How do a round up a number in PERL!', 'newbty help hash q plz!!!', 'debug my code', and 'PERL ??' in Newest Nodes.

There are enough people who've spent enough time writing good documentation that I don't feel the need to reinvent it when a simple pointer would do. If the documentation is incomplete or unclear, that's different.

If you want to rewrite the CGI.pm examples and post them every time someone asks a CGI question, feel free.

I'm sure not interested in that.

In reply to Re: Don't just provide a module name by chromatic
in thread Don't just provide a module name by gryphon

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