From: Mac <webrg.ruby-talk.com@...>
Date: 2004-03-04T00:19:51+09:00
Subject: Re: (noob) need help parsing Apache log file

Eric Schwartz wrote:
> Mark Hubbart <discord@mac.com> writes:
> 
>>On Feb 28, 2004, at 1:19 PM, Koncept wrote:
>>
>>>It is so nice to be a part of a group ( unlike those Perl folks ) where
>>>people are actually nice to each other.
>>
>>We're all nice here because programming in ruby is fun :) as for 
>>Perl... I'd better not say anything.
> 
> 
> To be fair, unlike Ruby, Perl has *tons* of documentation distributed
> with it that a poster could easily consult before posting a question;
> where it's not fair to tell someone to just "Read the Pickaxe", since
> that's not definitive or complete, it is fairly reasonable for a Perl
> programmer to be told to read the standard documentation on her hard
> drive before asking a question it could easily answer.
> 
> Hopefully, the hard work being put into the RDoc<->ri integration
> effort will result in similarly high-quality documentation being
> included with a default distribution of Ruby.
> 
> -=Eric

To be realy fair, as a perl newbie (and even now) I found/find the Perl 
docs to be unstructured, disjointed, scattered within the bundle. It 
reflects the history of the language, not a concise view of how the 
language works and how to get things done.

It also reflects (im very ho) the sometimes hard choices that were made 
to keep the language alive in the face of the requirements of it's users 
without completely breaking with it's history.

As to reponding to us newbies/nubys, Elwood P. Dowd (the movie "Harvey") 
  said he recommended " pleasant". Even in the face of documentation. 
Hopefully you're not suffering fools, you're helping people on an 
intellectual journey.

Mac