[MacPerl] Comments on some good points re beginner questions

[Arved Sandstrom <Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca>]

After seeing some of the posts, all ultimately generated by George
Cingolani's original question, I have to admit to changing my mind. I do
come from a UNIX background, and I didn't look at Perl until a variety of 
shells, C, awk etc. were all second-nature. I tried to put myself in the
shoes of someone starting out with MacPerl and without similar prior
exposure, and I'll buy the arguments that've been made.

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Eric Dobbs wrote:

> As the MacPerl user base grows (you do want it to grow don't
> you?) it's unrealistic to expect only pure MacPerl questions.
> Please reply to such questions with brief but specific
> pointers like Vicki's example, look in the "Help menu under
> Foo".  If you're going to answer with "RTFM", please at least
> suggest which manual, pod, or faq.

This all makes sense. I'm willing to bend over (a fair bit :-)) to ensure
that MacPerl sticks around, and I'm not going to Carp excessively over
whether a question relates to pure Perl or not.

I'll still stand by my assertion that questions to c.l.p.misc get pretty
decent treatment. And since it came up, there's other newsgroup(s) for
CGI.

I left in the reference to RTFM because if there's one acronym that burns
me, this is it. The F doesn't mean "fiddling" or "freaking" or anything
else other than a good old Anglo-Saxon word, just like in the acronym
SNAFU, and I personally think that this is one piece of shorthand that has
no place in civilized discussion.

I think the idea of a mini-FAQ is good, and the suggestion was made that
it be delivered as an initial email when joining the list - also good.




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