I remember being very enthusiastic about helping people on, say, Stack Overflow. It didn’t take much extra effort to be nice and made me happy.

But I also burned out relatively quickly. I’d happily answer new questions nicely, but the third or fourth time I saw the same question I spent much less effort to give a welcoming answer than I had the first time I saw it.

Of course, getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned.

I don’t know any good way to keep helpful volunteers helpful for a long time. The best idea I have is constantly recruiting new experts to continually replace the ones that burn out and chase off newbies.

Yep, especially when so many instances of TFM were awful. Perl's docs were fantastic, or so at least I thought at the time, but they were the first large open source project docs I devoured. I can imagine someone coming from another language not even considering just looking at the man page because they were used to awful documentation.

I agree in general (and already commented on this). But some people believe it's like giving fish instead of fishing rod. And I think it was prevalent idea in tech circles during 90s-00s that people who don't read that fm waste other participants time, and needlessly multiply forum topics or extend conversation history. Which was seen as uncivil behavior in those times.

If they specified ‘perldoc -v $|’ instead of just ‘man perldoc’ I’d have been thankful for that as the entire response. It’s literally a pointer to where the answer is and to how to use the canonical tool to find it.

Yes, it would look and work better if presented with an explanation like "you can find any var description by using...". But as I commented already in another thread there was a widespread belief in 90s-00s that users who ask about already documented pieces are being uncivil, not vice versa. So it's not about Perl community per se. The same was norm in many Linux fora, for example.

A professional medium might have been gate-kept being paying coursework. Perl was not: the super-complete documentation was right there, in the distribution; the remarkably intelligently written course book was right there on everyone's shelves and in your local public library; the in-depth books same thing; And quickly enough even free on the net; the expert-built module library was all there to use and study; the experts were giving their time freely, writing deep dive articles at the simple prompt of worthy questions in addition to columns on topics which I guess were not getting enough questions.

For a professional medium, the only lack that I can tell is from a marketing point of view: installing the distribution for example, probably did not highlight enough how extensive the documentation was.

> f*^&%k off

Hey you're writing perl already! ;)

Sorry for being salty earlier, but learning a language still takes at least a day or two of solid reading of the official manuals. https://perldoc.perl.org if you want a web version.

I disagree, at least when it comes to the web (of those days). What's the point of rewriting what's already well- and accurately-written in the docs? What better job are the people on that message board going to do with regards to such a small, specific syntax feature? The point of those "communities" wasn't to answer questions like "what is this variable?" but rather to have actual discussions on the language, such as how to structure applications, design patterns, projects, etc. Imagine trying to build an online community for this purpose, only to spend your days answering the most basic questions possible that were already explained many times before.

Eventually, a website more tailored to such questions was created - Stack Overflow - and there things were very different than in subject-specific communities: there was no "community", there were no discussions, just a big mess of questions. It had a purpose and it served it well. Now it's dying too because of LLMs, but I digress.

Now, in a different scenario, say a colleague asking you that question at work, a direct answer is warranted, but without letting the colleague know that this information and a lot more is a just a few keypresses away would be a wasted opportunity, and not particularly a good way to help that colleague progress.

You can only spoon feed people so much. At a certain point relying on other people to just give you the answer every time you don't know something is lazy. It's like you have no respect for their time.

  man perldoc