It's nice that PerlMonks is seen as a friendlier place to get help than, say, comp.lang.perl.misc, but I think that the reasons why most questions get an RTFM reply in clpm still apply here.

• There's the old "teach a man to fish" argument. We could hand you a fish every time you come to us, but it's ultimately more satisying for everyone if we run fishing lessons.
• There's also the question of accuracy. The Perl docs have been read by every Perl expert over a number of years. Most (if not all) of the inaccuracies have been ironed out. You can be sure that the answer you get from perldoc will be correct. Everything you get here is just a monk's opinion. That opinion may well be spot on, but until you have been here long enough to know who's who, how do you know who to trust?

Sometimes I hear people say that the Perl docs are too big and it's hard to find your way around. This was one of the reasons why I wrote the RTFM series of articles in Perlmonth.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

I think it's more to do with the way people are told to RTFM than the fact that they've been told that in the first place. The attitude in clpm is more "God you're SO STUPID, WHY didn't you check manual X subsection Y paragraph 9.32?? I hate newbies like you! You're all morons!" rather than the attitude here, which seems to be much more helpful. The replies to mr_leisure's post are all basically telling him to RTFM, but also telling him where he should be looking, and mostly politely without any bitching about how he should have known where to look in the first place.

'Course, this is just how I see things. I stopped reading clpm ages ago and it might have changed, and of course there are times when replies here are not exactly as friendly as they could be. This post does not affect your statutory rights to tell people to RTFM in any way you choose.

Suggesting information sources is better than just extracting the desired information because the person has to do some information processing on their own for the solution. This is a general attitude I think can be useful for newbies in particular, but also anyone else in need, that people need to be able to effectivly find information on their own without relying on gods to always provide the snippet desired.

Maybe people who learnt computers/programming originally in set lessons will feel differently than me. I'm pretty much fully self taught, from originally a university textbook on basic at the age of about 11ish, then some vb from tutorials, then a smidgen of C before I began perl from the the few chapters of Learning/Programming Perl I read while I had them temporarily. On the whole I find searching for or working out answers on my own more furfilling/enlightening than just asking and recieving RTFM or GRTN(go read this node). Possibly because of some experience in working things out myself I've gained from this I have never actually posted a question myself but always learnt from other peoples mistakes or mostly worked out things on my own. I find researching on other people's questions and projects such as what I put together for the jcwren programming challenge (It gave me an excuse to learn about HTML::Template and CSV) to give a kind of constant enlighenment.

Maybe that isn't neccessarily the right way to do it, but it's what i've done so far (and I suppose its worked, sorta :). Anyway, enough rambling.

Don't get me wrong here folks, this isn't a whinge.

I posted this opinion of mine to the discussion area to promote a discussion, so I could gauge the feelings of the other users.

Thanks for all the responses.



if ($mr_leisure) { bow; }
[download]

this is still not finished

Often a valid point to make is that you didn't need to ask the question, merely put in some elbow grease.

The subtext is that putting in elbow grease is how you make the transition from asking questions to being able to provide good answers. (Note: You typically can learn more from trying to answer questions well than you do from reading answers!) So it is a not so subtle way of encouraging people to become gurus themselves.

But all that said, very often when the answer is RTFM, it is best to not actually say RTFM. The reaction to the phrase "RTFM" is likely to be negative. If you can find a phrasing that says, "The answer you will get will be a pointer to existing discussion that you can yourself with standard search tools" without saying, "You twit! Why didn't you find that answer yourself?", that is more likely to be heard and acted on.

Sure, it might mean the same thing. But it is a useful social engineering point.

Very, very often answering an RTFM question with something else than RTFM (+ location where to look) is just a waste of time. Rewriting the (often excellent!) material in manuals and books is inefficient and error-prone.

Also, I often feel that the homework before asking the question has not been done to the required extent, e.g., if I can get a pointer to an answer by just typing the question into a search engine (e.g., www.google.com, or by using perldoc.

Just my 2 cent.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

But you can shoo away more flies with a big fan. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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