http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=756506


in reply to Which bad behaviour most deserves an electric shock?

My pet peeves (As someone who asks more questions than answers them....)

I try my best to be a good question asker, taking time to make sure everything is there, building the smallest sample and dataset that explains my problem. (Which also is a great debugging technique...)

Overly brief useless answers only designed to improve the posters XP. There are those who chirp in on threads with something like "Use CPAN". It is my theory that these yokels are not trying to be helpful, they're just trying to glom on to threads that will gain popularity and mooch the XP off of them.

Overly arcane answers that leave you wondering what they do. Many of the monks like to post code samples with something like print << $@ >>! if EOF while $% and no explanation. Mostly this just leaves you with a "What the hell?" feeling. I've remarked to a co-worker that I need to start "whatthehelldoesthatdo.com" where a collection of the strangest Perl idioms will be cataloged and explained.

Complex solutions to simple problems. A question about matching a brace pattern turns into "Use Parse::RecDescent". Two replies later (after the guy who writes "Use Cpan"), someone comes along and says "Oh, you just need to put a "?" there..."

The guy who points out that the "code" I wrote earlier in this post as an example of unreadability doesn't compile.

The guy who instead of answering your question picks an entirely different part of your script to criticize... "Well, before we even talk about the regex, you're not getting the file listing before it in the most efficient way. Sure, it works in Windows, but what happens if your script needs to run on an OS2 machine? I don't even want to talk about what would happen on a PDP-11..."

Those are my minor pet peeves that don't add up to much for all of the great help I have gotten here over the years.