zlacker

Fair enough, but I think the first part of the advice would be a lot more helpful if it included the second part too. It's the intermediate step that turns people off: why do I need to learn about `perldoc` when I asked about `$|`? (And that's assuming the question asker is familiar with man-pages to begin with, otherwise, you need to read `man man` first!) It feels like you're sending them off on a wild goose chase, even if that's not your intent.

In the millennial web forum world, a n00b would ask "what does $| do?" and the answer would be "it disables output buffering", which is what the n00b wanted to know in the first place. It's the Stack Overflow model of giving men fish, instead of teaching them how to fish.

And in today's LLM-powered world that's only more true. If you ask ChatGPT "In a Perl script, what does $|++ do?" it will immediately give you a correct and concise answer, not make you read `man perldoc` first.

>>sltkr+(OP)
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.