Re: [MacPerl] We're all Macperlers on this bus...

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

online@mactech.com (Jeff at MacTech) writes:
>I agree. The key problem I see is, as other have said, when you are faced
>with a script which doesn't behave as expected, you might not know if the
>problem is your understanding of Perl, an idiosyncrasy with the Mac
>implementation, a bug in the Mac version, or a bug in the core.

Agreed.

>The corollary to this is that if you do need to look elsewhere, it's on
>comp.lang.perl.misc, which is quite hostile in tone, and very unfriendly
>to beginners.

I think that's a misunderstanding. The hostility is exclusively directed at
people who post without doing their homework first (If you ever come across
any legitimate question that was answered rudely, forward the evidence to me).

>I worry that the mac-perl-toolbox v. mac-perl-bugs v. mac-perl distinction
>might be vague enough to promote cross-posting (or confusion) and defeat its
>own purpose.

I'm pretty confident that mac-perl-toolbox can be delineated quite clearly, and
I consider that an emerging clientele that I'd like to get better service:
They really don't have anywhere else to go for their questions right now
(except for AppleEvents, which are (at least regarding the mechanism) well
covered in MPPE), and frankly, they have the questions that I personally find
most interesting & stimulating right now.

mac-perl-www touches on many mundane Perl techniques in string processing and
such, but I think it still can be delineated, and a substantial portion of
MacPerlers are interested mostly in Webbish stuff.

I'm not so sure if I can defend mac-perl-bugs; your suspicion that this would
not work well in practice is plausible. Regarding the discussion about source
code builds and MacPerl feature requests, I'm confident that they can be kept
on topic. The problem area there is the bug reports in cases where users are
not sure. One method to deal with those would be to post them to mac-perl,
and if any of the more experienced users can confirm them, to repost to
mac-perl-bugs (This is in fact what is informally happening already: If
I ignore a legitimate bug report for too long, Chris or others remind me
about it in private e-mail).

>And I also doubt that we have to worry much about non-Mac people posting
>hugely off-topic things

You're overly optimistic here. I've seen numerous postings to mac-perl where
people *knowingly* asked off-topic questions (even occasionally about scripts
that could not possibly work on MacPerl), claiming that comp.lang.perl.misc was
"too rude" (Well, guess *why* comp.lang.perl.misc got rude in the first
place!). So far, it seemed better to tolerate these, but I'd prefer not to let
this practice get out of hand.

>>I get about 80 unsubscriptions every month; I don't count how many of
>>those move to -announce, change addresses, or drop out altogether, but I
>>consider the turnover fairly high.
>
>I wonder if the turnover is due to displeasure with the list, or just lack
>of time to read everything (or lack of time to program).

All of the above, I suspect. I virtually never get feedback why people are
unsubscribing.

>Is the running total fairly constant?

Yes. There's a sucker^H^H^H^Hbscriber born every minute :-)

Matthias

-- 
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
  "The reason why it is not a scam is because it is on the internet."
                         -- M. Syukri <syukri@pl.jaring.my>




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