-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

The Chatterbox can be helpful, but it does have its limitations with regard to asking non-Perl questions. I use DevShed when I'm stuck and I must say I had very little joy there - there just isn’t enough participants, and I usually have to wait a day before a get a reply which helps me out of what ever hole I've managed to fall into. Maybe there’s some others out there, but I do see your point, a separate forum titled "Non-Perl Related" would be very helpful, and if people weren’t interested in it then they wouldn’t click on its link - just like I've never visited the "Obfuscated Code" section...actually I did, once. ;)

I understand your difficulties; it can be a bit overwhelming to learn programming in Perl, Unix, HTTP etc. all at once (as I did, a few years while ago). Regarding your example -- just a few days ago somebody gave an explanation about how cookies work (I forgot the thread, sorry). Yes, that's not purely perl, but it was related to a problem solved in perl.

On the other hand, there are questions like this one, which have nothing to do with perl at all. This question should have been sent to the ISP's support. If someone were to come and say, hey, I'm doing this Cold Fusion/Javascript page and am using cookies, I am sure people would be much less willing to explain the basic principle behind it.

There are actually a lot of purely CGI-oriented resources on the web. You might want to check out http://www.cgi-resources.com, they have a lot of tutorials, links etc.

While I agree that most of the Off Topic questions are from an experienced Perl users perspective nothing to do with Perl, from a very inexperienced new user's point of view all bound together into the same topic.

Many of the popular Perl books that someone would find on an average book shop's shelf are called things like "Perl/CGI", "Learn Perl/CGI in 21 days", "PERL for the WWW" and so on. Therefore most people assume that Perl is CGI, and Perl is WWW. I know there are better books, but the big shiny ones, with a CD-ROM promising instant knowledge seem to appeal more...

To make matters worse most web servers are Apache on *nix, so any problem with CGI because of miss-configuration of the server, or permissions problems must also be Perl related. Most people are use to using Windows, and given that most people can't even use that properly, one does wonder what hope they have on a *nix box?

Most people therefore have poor/weak books to start with, don't know how to find the basic docs, assume everything to do with the web is PERL, and all too often are too impatient.

We all know that there are great books out there, we know how to Google, we know how to separate our problems out, and we take time think our problems through, and we ask sensible questions to the right people.

I don't know what we should do about the Clueless, but the Internet is full of them, and if left to their own devices they could do a lot of damage.......

I too would welcome a section of the site where we could discuss programming queries only tangentially related to Perl. The chatterbox is just too small for serious discussion.

Although I'm programming in Perl, many of the issues I come across aren't directly related to Perl - I'm sure it's the same for many other Monks. After all, nobody programs in a vacuum ("No language is an island"?) - all the work I do in Perl involves interacting with other software.

I feel disppointed when a SoPW is given a dismissive answer, or even considered for deletion, on "no Perl in this" grounds - if some of us have knowledge which could be useful to others, why not share it? It's a shame when an interesting question is dismissed because it 'breaks the rules', and it often looks to me like mere oneupmanship.

Of course, nobody wants the whole monastery to go wildly off-topic - it's pretty easy to see why that would be a Bad Thing. But Pure Perl Monks needn't be disturbed by a seperate section devoted to technical issues only tangentially related to Perl - they could just ignore it.

andye.

I find the Chatterbox is good for finding resources, rather than getting explicit help. Asking "does anyone know of some good online cookie references?" is more likely to get the desired response than "can anyone help me with cookies?", and can be just as useful. Finding the right FM is half the battle.

(As for asking specific questions, CB can be good for that, too, with the longer texts and bits of code posted to the participants' scratch pads. It's more of a pain for the participants, but it's less invasive to people who aren't interested and doesn't clutter up search results with non-Perl nodes. It also avoids the inevitable "DELETE: no Perl" considerations, and arguments like this one. :-)

I'm of two minds about establishing an off-topic section. On the one hand, there are a lot of brilliant people here, who could probably answer a lot more than just Perl questions. On the other hand, there are other appropriate fora for off-topic questions. Usenet, for instance. You could ask a question about radiosity rendering in this hypothetical new section, and I'd do my best to answer it, and so would a few other monks... but it would really be better off (and probably better answered) in comp.graphics.

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m

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