in reply to unanswered questions

From time to time, I go back through my incoming email to see if there are questions I am now willing to answer but wasn't at the time it came in. (For various reasons, I have email from last week, last month, last year, and even last century in my inbox.)

I first send email to the person of "is this still a problem, or have you solved it by now?" More often than not, my lack of response has sent them somewhere else for a satisfactory solution. So I'd be wasting my time to also solve it now.

I think that'd be true here as well. If the original poster isn't satisfied within the first few days, they'll likely seek help elsewhere. It's not useful then to re-solve the problem here, when there are so many other new timely postings each day.

Considering the "people who are willing to help" to be a limited pool, let's keep people focussed on solving the useful (current!) issues.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: unanswered questions
by samizdat (Vicar) on Aug 01, 2005 at 17:10 UTC
    Hi, merlyn -

    Indeed, there are always many new questions and questioners, and always more of them than answers and answerers, especially ones as wise and experienced as yourself.

    However, I would -- with much sackcloth and ashes weighing my shoulders to promote humble thought -- diffidently suggest that Perl and the domains it interfaces with are so large that there are many questions well worth having answered that aren't. PerlMonks is a hugely valuable community resource, and having such answers in our archive -- even if they might no longer be pertinent for the OP's urgent need -- is much more important than having forty-leven different explanations of regex parameters that disappear into the mists of time.

    There are few resources where multi-system questions are appropriately answered, and this is one of them. Perl is such a wonderful gluey mess that people use it for all kinds of things. There are a few others (UGU comes to mind), but often such are so diluted by their need to handle many variants of their subject matter.

    I can appreciate that many neophytes come to PerlMonks looking for answers to questions about core Perl, but there are also those of us who are here to seek insight and to share experience about far more exotic usages and interations.

    Why cannot PM serve both? As it is now, both mundane and exotic questions share space on SoPW. If there were to be a distinction, both questioners and answerers would have direct access to that which they seek. No longer would neophytes be confused by exotica, and no longer would arcane practitioners have their incantations swept away upon the winds of mundane dust.
[reply]

In Section Perl Monks Discussion