First off, good point! {NULE}++

I suppose in many ways I am the exact opposite of you. I often post, and I often reply, and I often spout off what I think is 'best practice' or whatever it is that I think is relevant. And sometimes I even do it in a harsh and judgemental way. And for this I have been abused and contradicted and criticised. And educated.

For me the beauty of this place is that even when i'm right, (cause im _always_ right :-) someone smarter or more experienced is nice enough to come along and show that i'm wrong. Sometimes they do it by posting code, a benchmark or a documentation. Sometime they simply make a remark that points out the stupidity of what I said. But you know what, from those responses I learn. I learn what kind of remarks exact "witty" responses from the community, and usually they are the kind of things that had I thought about in more depth I would never have said.

Thankfully most of our wizardly brethren refrain

I disagree. There are times and places when the facts are simple, you said or did something dumb and you deserve to be told of it. This doesnt mean that you arent welcome in the Monastery, but rather should serve as an indication that a little bit of research, a little bit of analysis, a little bit of holistic thinking is needed before you say something stupid. Advice that applies to all walks of life and not just posting here.

But we must never forget that when you are an acolyte of the community the harsh words of one who is your senior (particularly with the reknown of some of our friends here) can be particularly damaging.

Damaging? Hmm. Not to be harsh but if you cant stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. Programming is an intellectual sport. If one of these old pros says you did something dumb (well, assuming the criticism is not malicious, and such comments dont usually last more than 5 seconds of consideration) then you have three choices, a) get even, prove em wrong or put up a damn good fight. b) get over it, and try to learn from the experience or lastly c) get lost, and never gain the fruits of knowledge that are in such abundance here.

Now a last comment about the node in question. The solution was dumb. Im sorry but it was. Anybody with the slightest exposure to perl culture (and programming in general) should have been thinking "Theres got to be a better way to do this" and then done the basic research to find out what it was. But the poster in question didn't. And so merlyn quite rightfully took the piss out of him (in frankly not that harsh a way). Hopefully the poster has learned from this. I suspect a bunch of other people have.

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.