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This is a question I've thought about at different times, and come up with different answers each time. This is my thinking for now.
Homework: Let's take the case of the person asking to stick the values 1 through 10 into a hash, and print them back out. This clearly reeked of homework. I've decided (for me) that if people really are asking homework questions, they should be slapped. And hard. The point of homework is not to go ask someone else for the answers. I imagine that we all pretty much agree on this. Questions: When I looked at my first post, I was asking how to pass named parameters to a subroutine. I wasn't strong on anonymous hashes, and I clearly identified that I had left my trusty Perl CD Bookshelf at home that day, and needed an answer. Without the context, this could be construed as a homework question. I feel if someone qualifies why they're looking for an answer ("I don't know *where* to look", "I have a 2400 modem connection, web searchs are painful", etc), I'm much more tolerant of 'newbie' class questions. Formatting, etc: Folks that post without reading the how-to post really bother me. It's like jumping into a newsgroup without reading the FAQ for that group, or reading old messages to get a feel for it. "Oh look, a place to type, let's ask a question" seems to be the method for some people. My favorite pet peeve is "My program doesn't work, how come?" Giving as much information as possible (within reason, of course. Generally, no one cares if you used 'vi' to edit) is a definite incentive to help. Playing "guess what the user really means" is not my pasttime. I don't think that "You suck, provide more information or else." type replies are necessary, but I've seen a number of instances where respondents tried to guess what the poster was asking for. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but it shouldn't be necessary. CPAN: On the other hand, it took me a little bit to grasp just how comprehensive the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is. I think many people end up "re-inventing the wheel" because the wheel store is not well advertised. Oh, once you know it's there, that's the first place you head. But CPAN needs to be better advertised for people getting into Perl. Most of the books touch on it, but don't say "You probably don't really need to write that, there's a module already". That should be beaten into peoples heads, not casually tossed out. Search engines: In this day and age, I feel that if you don't know how to use a search engine, you shouldn't be on the net. There's dozens, nay, hundreds of questions I could have asked here, but found the answer through Google. And that's not the only search engine. There's Dogpile, Alta Vista, Yahoo, literally dozens of search engines. Not to mention the newsgroups (Oh yea, and jlp, when he's around. He's a pretty handy resource when I'm having a senior moment). Now, one of the unfortunate things that Perl suffers from, although admittedly to a lesser degree than Linux itself, is too much information. Nothing like 20,000 people compulsively mirroring information from 3 years ago, that's horribly out of date, with bad links (this is a pet peeve of mine. Search engines need to re-index a *lot* more often). Try searching for 'Perl hash anonymous' in Google. 29,600 hits as of 10/11/2000, 13:22 GMT. Some words are so common that it's hard to find an answer. And relative to the 3rd paragraph, if someome says they've tried the search engines and can't find a helpful answer, then that makes me more inclined to try to help them. Finally, there is something we need to keep in mind. This has been mentioned by others, but is well worth repeating. We were all new at something, at one time or another. While we have some *very* experienced people here, we also get a lot of people new to the langauge, and new to programming in general. Before we blow them off with a "This is too obvious" type reply, we need to remember that an answer like that is not beneficial to *anyone*. They can always be directed to resources that will answer their questions, but we don't have to be rude about it. And maybe that's (more or less) the bottom line of this ramble. Rather than give an insulting answer (except in the case of homework questions, where that's just plain fun), we can point them towards resources oriented towards their skill levels, whether on site, on 'net, or in print. If we tried to answer every question every 'newbie' asked with a complete answer, we'd have a lot of very large duplicate nodes... --Chris (And because I can't seem to stop typing this morning, I'll add one more thing. I judge each question to be answered on it's own merit. Sometimes I'll pursue a question because it's an interesting challenge, sometimes because I think a previous poster is wrong, and sometimes because I don't know the answer, and think I should. And sometimes, just sometimes, to be the first to post a reply... (How SlashDot-esq, eh?)) In reply to (jcwren) RE: Are there questions to [sic] basic?
by jcwren
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