I adore you, stvn, and this isn't directed at Moose in particular. Just a good example and timing. I want to go on the record (probably should have saved this for a meditation) with this idea: IRC Considered Harmful.

IRCs are knowledge holes even when they are archived and searchable which many (most?) are not. The signal to noise ratio is too high to make them fun or effective to search even when you can; bad answers mixed with good; hacks mixed with best practice; sigils and stopwords galore. Too much intrinsic context; not stateful.

Excellent or important answers and clarifications happen in them all the time without being recorded or refined into a form which would be valuable to more than the two or three users paying attention. IRCs are anti-DRY.

IRCs also nurture clique behavior which can be discouraging to outsiders and would-be contributors even when genial and when it's not friendly it's easy to get away with being a jerk in a chat; it's familiar to the regulars and ephemeral. It's very difficult to get away with it on a mailing list; you often get dogpiled when you try.

I know I'd love to hang around with you personally. I am sad for all the things about MOP or Kioku or DBIC or ... which have zipped through the IRCs without landing in the right™ and "permanent" places: the documentation and tutorials (personal, community, or distributed with the code).

(Sidebar: I will buy you drinks if you're ever in my town. Then we can plumb some real knowledge holes.)

In reply to IRC Considered Harmful by Your Mother
in thread How to choose the right module by sans2030

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.