From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-03-04T06:17:15+09:00
Subject: Re: (noob) need help parsing Apache log file


On Mar 2, 2004, at 4:49 PM, 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.

what I meant was:
   We're all nice here because programming in ruby is fun. As for
   Perl... I'd better not say anything. :)

I think that's clearer :)

Regardless, even if Ruby WAS superbly documented, I still think newbies 
should be responded to in the same way: a quick example, and a 
reference to more information. When you are new to a programming 
language, sometimes you only know what the result of your code *should* 
be, and have no way of knowing how to go about actually *getting* it. 
So even if you did look in the docs, you might not know what to look 
for.

Simple questions from these "extreme newbies", IMHO, should be left for 
the more advanced newbies. If they were treated the same way, they will 
probably be happy to answer them, sort of giving back to the group.

So everyone should feel it's okay to jump in; ask a question, give a 
response if you think it's correct, correct someone else if they are 
wrong, show another way of doing it. Politely. With this kind of open 
communication, people can say things without fear of getting 
backhanded. Good temperaments in a community can be a big draw, and it 
can be easily evidenced by interactions in the newsgroup :)

heh. that sounded really cheezy, but you know what I mean.

Just my 2�

--Mark