Kudra is probably right about it being a troll (although it would have been more effective had it been phrased as a homework problem ;). I am amazed at the number of people who downvoted the node since the Anonymous Monk can't see the rep of the node unless it gets into either the Best Nodes or Worst Nodes. I don't think the responses to CGI.pm were overly harsh or discouraging and the respondents did point the original poster to good information as to why they shouldn't reinvent CGI.pm. Having said that, I think we should be very careful not to be overly harsh or discouraging to newcommers. There are good reasons to reinvent the wheel occasionally (although CGI.pm may be an exception).

A few years back, I did some fairly extensive perl programming on the Mac. At the time, it was a good bet that any module that required compiliation (XS) or depended on a module requiring compilation wasn't going to work. I spent the better part of a weekend writting date calculation routines because I couldn't use Date::Calc and Date::Manip was overkill for the project I was working on. Things are much better on the Mac side these days, but I can see this happening again. I just got a Psion Revo and installed the EPOC port of perl 5.6 on it. Not only is it unlikely that anything from CPAN will run in this environment, but some of the standard modules will not run on the Revo. If I do anything serious with it, I see quite a bit of wheel reinvention in my future. The point here is that there may be a good reason that someone would try to rewrite tested and highly regarded code. We should probably try to clarify motive before passing judgement.

While I don't feel comfortable enough in my robes to really be active in the monastery, I do have some general rules I follow when voting or commenting on a node:

• Check the poster's home node before voting. If a person is new to the site or is at a fairly low level (<4), I /msg the user rather than downvote them.
• Ask for clarification either in responses or in the chatbox if the reason why a question was asked is unclear.
• Ignore bad postings by the Anonymous Monk. If these postings make it to the Worst Nodes list, then we are likely to see more trolls. The original poster will not see the rep of their node, so downvotes are not effective in shaping the poster's behavior. Also, the Anonymous Monk does not have access to the chatbox, so we can't easily clarify the poster's intent.

TIMTOWTDI is one of the things that makes perl so compelling for me. The atmosphere of perlmonks keeps me checking the site several times a day. Thanks, deprecated, for bringing this up I would hate to see perlmonks pick up the unfriendly (although justified) feeling of comp.lang.perl.misc.

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Coyote