in reply to "Yellow Pages"
All that I know, and all that therefore I can possibly express, is what I know from my own [decades of...] personal experience. I find that I do search-for and carefully refer-to postings and comments that were written many years ago, finding them to still be very-much relevant.
Certainly, while the “here’s a piece of Perl code that you can cut-n-paste” postings are useful to the newbees to whom they are primarily addressed, the rest of us can of course knock those things off in our sleep. Hence, they have fairly short-term value because, if you know how to write Perl source-code, you don’t particularly need to see that someone else does, too. Other code fragments, of course, are simply illustrations. No, the sort of posts that have long-term value to me are the sort of ones that I myself attempt to write: the ones where people discuss solutions and issues that are less of a tactical and more of a strategic nature. i.e. Given that you already know the base machinations of the language itself, and perhaps even given that you might be tackling a thorny problem using more than one language at a time, you seek a “sounding board” for the underlying issues and trade-offs. You seek the counsel of your esteemed peers, genuinely holding them and their opinions in esteem. You find those things here also at PerlMonks. I of course certainly do not mean to imply that the other sort of postings are without value, nor to besmirch anyone at all because we all started in the same place (and wind up there again, periodically). That’s the beauty and the value of a free-and-open forum. You write what you want when you want to ... and in so doing, you build up quite a massive knowledge-base that keeps people coming back for more. Every technical forum does that ... and I think that PerlMonks is one of the best.
As an aside, people continue to bring up “Perl++” as though the notion of “a purported successor-language that didn’t manage to ship before it became irrelevant” was a new happening. It isn’t. In any case, every user of a language looks forward to a better-future tool that never actually makes an impact, such as e.g. the various efforts affectionately known as: ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL ON SIZE ERROR NEXT SENTENCE. In the end, you dance with the one that brung ’ya, and you make a pretty okay living doing that.
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Re^2: "Yellow Pages"
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 08, 2012 at 15:09 UTC | |
by aaron_baugher (Curate) on Jun 09, 2012 at 01:10 UTC | |
by Don Coyote (Hermit) on Jun 22, 2012 at 08:41 UTC | |
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 22, 2012 at 09:28 UTC | |
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 24, 2012 at 13:03 UTC | |
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 25, 2012 at 07:25 UTC |