use Perl

• an alternate approach (Score:1)

  by markjugg (792)

  An alternate approach is to let the person finish stating their question (as they began to), answer it, and then in conclusion suggest an alternate way to phrase the question next time.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by rjbs (4671)

    Sure. My initial thought was, "Is this guy going to actually ask a question, or just wait to have someone say, 'I am here and listening.'?" That's a common IRC problem.

    There are limits to how solicitous I'm willing to be to people who come asking for free help, too.

    --
    rjbs
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chrisv (8116)

      Impatient teachers make bad educators. In general, impatient people make bad company.

      Maybe you need to take a vacation, or do some yoga, or start asking money for your knowledge (aka start consulting).

      Maybe you could draw some conclusions and learn from this experience, rjbs.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rjbs (4671)

        This is not about being impatient, it is about trying to make sure that the applicant is actually going to realize he should ask his question.

        I'm not sure I can avoid sounding like a conceited jerk when I say that if you think I am an impatient teacher or person, you do not know me very well.

        --
        rjbs
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      My initial thought was, “Is this guy going to actually ask a question, or just wait to have someone say, ‘I am here and listening.’?”

      Just ignore him. If he says “hello? anyone awake?”, only then prompt purl for the ask-to-ask spiel. If he doesn’t ever say that, and doesn’t ask his actual question either, well, tough luck.

      I have found that trying to correct people’s behaviour, regardless of how well you mean, isn’t worth the hassle. If they don
• Maybe ... (Score:1)

  by soulchild (8747)

  ... he's been bitten one too many times by what seems to have become the standard in the Perl community: an attitude defined by smart-assing and nitpicking. Ask a stupid question and you're in for a kick in the ass! Out there in the normal world it's known that there simply is no such thing as a stupid question - not so in Perl world. IMHO this is one of the things that's making Perl unattractive to beginners and causes it to lose ground in a frightening way. The Perl community is shrinking to a few highly
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by rjbs (4671)

    This has little to nothing to do with the Perl community. Nearly every technical channel I've ever been on has the same, "Please just ask your question" mentality, because it is very frustrating to watch people join the channel, say "hello? I have a question. I'm going to ask it soon!" and then /quit when no one announces his approval or awareness of this.

    I am aware that there are things about the Perl community that drive away new blood. I just don't think that this particular transcript demonstrates an

    --
    rjbs
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by soulchild (8747)

      Right, but I think it doesn't hurt replying to this "ok, let's start a conversation" statement in a nice way either, does it? A simple "Shoot!" is what I'd expect from a real conversation. Why does this have to lead to snippy replies on irc that just disencourage the questioner? It makes the whole thing more human. After all that's what distinguishes it from a "conversation" held by robots where one bot tries to dump some data in a machine-readable format the other one might be able to parse :) You're righ
      • Re:Maybe … (Score:1)

        by Aristotle (5147)

        For better or for worse, since IRC is neither synchronous the way a phonetic conversation is nor usually one’s sole activity, IRC is almost nothing like a real conversation.
        • Re:Maybe ... (Score:1)

          by mr_bean (3802)

          Or like a conversation where the 2 parties have
          no social skills.
          • Re:Maybe … (Score:1)

            by Aristotle (5147)

            Whether that was an attempt at being funny or insightful, it failed.
• Elapsed Time? (Score:2)

  by Mr. Muskrat (4572)

  For all we know he typed up the "context" and hit enter, started typing the actual question and before he could finish typing you sicced purl on him. It's happened to me a few times on IRC (I have a habit of hitting enter too soon) which prompted me to /quit (I was feeling all warm and fuzzy inside). Maybe that's what happened but maybe not... Maybe you waited a minute or two but we can't tell. Without timestamps we have no idea how much time elapsed so it's easy to jump to the conclusion that you didn't
• User is typing... (Score:1)

  by ZuLuuuuuu (8763)

  Actually, this is why the "XXX is typing a message right now..." feature implemented in MSN or similar IM software. If you could see that jbarton was typing something after the introduction then you would know that he was writing the question and not waiting somebody to answer. Somehow, when you don't see the person you speak to there are many moments that you should know if everything he/she is going to say is over. That's why for example when speaking with walkie-talkies we say "over" after finishing wha