in reply to A Cautionary tale for Newbies "Monks don't bite"

Thanks, Gavin. You've encouraged me to join the monastery!

I've been an occasional lurker in comp.lang.perl.misc for a while (curious about Perl, but never really tried it until the past few days). Like in quite a few usenet groups, clpm regulars aren't slow to slap down people who obviously haven't read the FAQ or the Google Groups archive, or even really tried to solve their problems themselves before crying for help. That's fair enough, but a few seem to go out of their way to find fault.

It's particularly difficult when trying to learn a new language. It's all very well to say RTFM, but if you don't know the name of the command you want, it's not always obvious where to look.

This looks like a more welcoming place to be.

Polonius

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Re^2: A Cautionary tale for Newbies "Monks don't bite"
by blazar (Canon) on Apr 20, 2006 at 13:23 UTC

    As a person who's been both in clpmisc and here, and is now regularly visiting both regularly, I can say that the different behavioural approaches have each their own advantages and disadvantages.

    In particular the alleged or perceived attituded of clpmisc's regulars is nothing but striving for efficient and fruitful communication. The typical scenario goes like this:

    • newbie asks how to do something, whihout showing code, possibly multi-posting and so on;
    • knowledgeable regular asks him what he's tried so far, and possibly points him/her to the posting guidelines;
    • newbie replies that if he doesn't know how to answer, then he/she'd better not post, and gives him/her names;
    • sub-thread goes on about how much the knowledgeable regular is an ar**hole on one part and about why he/she did answer that way in the first place on the other one - trying to convince newbie that that is really helping him/her;
    • very-little-knowledgeable poster supplies a ready-made solution, often buggy, at the very best spreading (or even cargo-culting) that kind of bad practices that give Perl a bad name in so many circles;
    • newbie thanks and is content with that solution.

    Now, there happen to be basically two categories of newbies: those that learn rapidly who are the knowledgeable ones who could give them good advice and realize that if they behave somewhat (seemingly) harshly to newbies then there must be a (good educational) reason, and those who refuse to learn this simple lesson and prefer to go on writing huge threads insulting this and that - basically remaining poorly informed newbies forever.

    To some extent the same goes on here too. But there's more tolerance, especially wrt questions that are OT as far as perl is concerned but are really about webservers or html.

    Oh, well, as I wrote there are advantages and disadvantages: in clpmisc I'm now able to tell in a few seconds which threads to follow and which to ignore. OTOH PM has a richer UI which is sometimes convenient...

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      ...and other times is a time sink! 8^)
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