All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

more people who can't cope with irc

rjbs on 2008-07-17T20:36:25

If you can't handle even this light amount of attitude, you probably should stick to ... I don't know what. Support from consultants?

 i have a question about the usage of $c->views and $c->view
<@rjbs> purl: ask to ask
 Don't ask to ask.  Just ask!  If no one answers, then rest assured 
       it's because no one knows the answer. or perhaps no one likes you 
       enough to bother answering
 i didnt ask to ask
 i am typing my question out
<@rjbs> Ok.  Announcing that you are about to ask is just a variation on 
        a theme. ;)
 not really
<@mst> yes really.
 i was giving context
 well arent you a bunch of assholes, nevermind then
<@rjbs> Ok, finish preparing your question and ask it.
<<< jbarton [~jbarton@12-216-234-217.client.mchsi.com] has quit : []

I mean, I even used a smiley!

an alternate approach

markjugg on 2008-07-18T02:09:39

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:an alternate approach

rjbs on 2008-07-18T02:26:07

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.

Re:an alternate approach

chrisv on 2008-07-18T08:52:53

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:an alternate approach

rjbs on 2008-07-18T11:07:39

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.

Re:an alternate approach

Aristotle on 2008-07-19T10:37:58

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’t know they are doing something wrong, and their behaviour has not failed them yet, then pointing out their mistake just makes you seem like a pedantic jerk. They need to fail in order to accept correction. If you ignore them, they will get disappointed and/or frustrated about their lack of success at some point, and will then be amenable to suggestions for a better approach. Alternatively, someone else will help them with their immediate problem, in which case they don’t learn anything but you don’t have to deal with them either.

It might seem cold and manipulative, but the empathic approach generates more ill will than the apathetic one.

Maybe ...

soulchild on 2008-07-18T07:51:45

... 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 proficient experts whereas the number of beginners or not-so-hard-core (mostly web) developers is getting smaller and smaller, ultimately fleeing to PHP or Ruby where they find a lot more "average" developers (AND experts) they can relate to. Having lots of experts is great - but having _only_ experts kills whatever it is you're working with.

Re:Maybe ...

rjbs on 2008-07-18T11:06:13

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 any of them.

Re:Maybe ...

soulchild on 2008-07-18T11:42:47

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 right about this not being a Perl-specific problem, though.

Re:Maybe &#8230;

Aristotle on 2008-07-19T10:49:19

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 ...

mr_bean on 2008-07-24T01:07:47

Or like a conversation where the 2 parties have
no social skills.

Re:Maybe &#8230;

Aristotle on 2008-07-24T07:28:44

Whether that was an attempt at being funny or insightful, it failed.

Elapsed Time?

Mr. Muskrat on 2008-07-18T15:52:49

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 give him the time to type up his question before prompting the bot.

User is typing...

ZuLuuuuuu on 2008-07-27T10:37:18

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 what we want to say so that we don't mess up the 1-way communication (unlike the 2-way communication on telephones). I don't know if IRC allows an implementation of "currently typing feature" but if not then we can use "over" word :D