Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Attention Ungrateful Bastards 14 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.

  • More Comments Here (Score:3, Informative)

    by chromatic (983) on 2003.04.16 0:05 (#19180) Homepage Journal

    Advogato has further discussion [advogato.org], including rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth responses by yours truly.

    • Shlomi appears to be kind of a whiner [advogato.org], who has lots of ideas [mpe.mpg.de] but produces little code. I remember, though, that he sent a large doc patch to P5P, that wasn't applied apparently.

      • Re:More Comments Here (Score:5, Informative)

        by schwern (1528) on 2003.04.16 4:35 (#19187) Homepage Journal
        I was attempting to keep names out of this. Oh well, I guess I'm pretty transparent.

        This little rant occured while attempting to coax Shlomi into resubmitting his doc patches since they appear to have been dropped on the floor by p5p with the exception of one reply that he probably didn't see.

      • I do have some constructive criticism sometimes (or sometimes plain attacks, unfortunately), and I do have much more ideas than code, granted.

        But I still have prepared a lot of code - Freecell Solver, LM-Solve, MikMod for Java, many lectures to the Haifa Linux Club and a lot of code that was used internally, or for my studies. The purpose of the document was to enlighten many people and create a snowball effect in the Perl community. It was also supposed to open the eyes of the leaders of the Perl comm

    • Maybe my sensitivity is less due to early exposure to Usenet flamage, but I sure wouldn't characterize your responses as rabid or foaming-at-the-mouth. I thought they were rather polite, actually.

    • chromatic,
      I am not able to reply to the discussion on Advogato, I was wondering if you could send this reply to the author.

      I have been using Perl for just over a year. I was a newbie not to long ago, and I am by no means a guru. I never felt that the resources at hand were lacking. If I could not locate or understand the answer to my problem in the Perl documentation or a book I asked my question in a Perl community.
      To say the Perl Community is deceptively simple, more accurately there is a network of P
    • If that's rabid and foaming, I'd love to see you get really worked up.

  • +1 Funny (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mir (51) <xmltwig@gmail.com> on 2003.04.16 7:50 (#19189) Homepage Journal

    I stopped reading after a while, but I really laughed at some parts of this. I just think Schlomo has a solution in search of a problem. If he wants to run a website for beginners, than be it, but there is no need to trash the rest of the community over it.

    Here are some choice quotes from the article:

    Now if she knows how to use E-mail (she may or may not have such a good net-wisdom)

    (remember she got a job as a "a system administrator, CGI programmer, Bio-informatics engineer, hardware designer, QA engineer or whatever")

    It contains some reviews of books (which Mel may not have time to read), a free online book (again, same issue)

    You know, because she needs to learn a new language but has certainly no time to READ about it...

    The question still stands: why do you need a book to learn Perl? Why can't you learn it from the Internet alone?

    Why do you need a book to learn Math?

    The Perl Beginners List In my opinion is a bit useless. It is very high volume, and usually whenever one considers replying to a question, it receives three replies by the time he finished composing it. I was also subscribed and it was too high volume to be effective for me as a "guru". I believe newbies will not be able to handle such volumes either.

    I love this one! The Perl Beginners List is way too helpful! No one reads it anymore, it's way too crowded (attributed to Yogi Fish)

    --
    mirod

  • Same old story (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jbc (428)
    Granted, that the people delivering this message frequently beg to be ignored (or worse) by virtue of their newbiehood-cum-attitude. But this particular criticism has been aimed at the Perl community for a long time (at least as long as I've been paying attention, including when I was the one with the newbiehood-cum-attitude).
    Each side is technically "right," at least within its own frame of reference. Yes, Perl's available documentation has been, and still is (though to a lesser extent than previously) off
    • This is not about whether or not the docs need improvement. The docs can always use improvement. This is about the way some people try to go about it: with a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

      • Re:Same old story (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jbc (428)
        Well, right. I realize that's what you were commenting on, and your point is, of course, perfectly valid. But again, this is just the latest in a very long series of such incidents, and at some point it's probably worth taking a step back and asking if there might be a larger lesson to be learned.

        I think there is such a larger lesson: that the newbies who persist in voicing this particular frustration have a point. Their needs really aren't being adequately met by the existing docs. Pointing out that they

  • Are we meeting the needs of Jerri Blank [jerriblank.com], "Webmaster" [ic.ac.uk]?

    Maybe we need a Clifford The Big Red Dog series of Perl books. Online and free, of course, or else Shlomi Fish will accuse us of "hiding" them.

    Or Perl personal trainers, who come by and teach people, even when they don't want to learn! For free!

Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.