One of the greatest things about perl is the community -- in fact, probably the greatest, IMHO. A big part of that is readily available, friendly help with problems.

One of the best things any of us can do to advocate perl is to maintain that atmosphere.

I believe that homework questions that are reasonably specific in nature and show that the poster is attempting to learn are not only acceptable, but valuable to other monks as well.*

If we had a more positive view of well-phrased homework questions, it might also encourage people to be more straightforward about it, instead of trying to disguise their intentions.

Even the lazy-type questions deserve to be handled with some decorum and respect for the poster. To echo the comments of many others, everyone is a beginner at some point. I have asked my share of dumb questions here or in c.l.p.misc, and I am sure I will ask more in the future.

In my experience, even when the response is a variant of RTFM, it has always been both useful and respectful. I believe that is something that the perl community should take to heart as one of its great strengths.

</ajdelore>

* For instance, I had no idea that calling <> in list context would read the whole file into an array of lines until I read this node yesterday. I always thought you had to explicitly iterate over <> or else set $/ = undef and slurp the whole file into a string.

In reply to Re: Homework threads aren't necessarily evil by ajdelore
in thread Homework threads aren't necessarily evil by dragonchild

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.