in reply to Stupid stumpers and good questions

There is an interesting common attribute of the three types of question you like: they all come from people who already have some decent amount of Perl knowledge -- enough to have formed some idea of how things should work and what sorts of solutions they can choose from. Yes, it's always good when people already know things.

I've been noticing that a lot of SoPW posts are coming from people who admit to being new to Perl and/or new to programming in general. (Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there are more of these lately than there used to be, thinking back over the years.) And sometimes, they present a fourth kind of question: "I need to do this particular thing with this sort of data, and I don't know how."

That kind can be really "good", when a reply can show a pseudo-code solution, and point out how short and easy the transition can be from coherent pseudo-code to a working perl script. Of course, this often gets confounded by the OP not having any initial code, and replies saying "show us what you've tried", and so on. And of course, sometimes it's just homework or a FAQ. But sometimes it's "real."

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Re^2: Stupid stumpers and good questions
by Jenda (Abbot) on Sep 07, 2009 at 18:58 UTC

    You can usually tell whether the person "knows no Perl" or "has no programming experience whatsoever". The first are usually fine, no matter what language did the person work with before. Except for an occasional "how do I do foo in Perl" where "foo" is not a task, but rather the name of a function in some (often unknown) other language. I generally hate those. I'm pretty certain I could help the person, if only he told us what the heck he wants to do. But I can't know all functions from all languages.

    An example in that other language TOGETHER with the explanation is great, a single function name is useless.

    The questions asked by people with no programming experience are usually ... either so vague that I do not have any idea what is the actual question or requests for a complete script doing something vaguely defined. And I tend to ignore them.

    Jenda
    Enoch was right!
    Enjoy the last years of Rome.

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