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.
$|++ is arcane to anyone not steeped in Perl
The newbies could be warmly welcomed and shown respect.
But no, RTFM.
That is rude to somebody drowning in newness. If you do not want to answer their question, then don't. But some people seem to get a kick out of being rude to weaker people
All the times it happened to me, back in the '90s this made life really much harder than it needed to be.
For all the ones who bum me out
For all the ones who fill my head with doubt
For all the squares who get me pissed
You've made my shitlist
If only you had read the manual...
Seriously though, of course I wasn't advocating for rudeness, and trust me, I remember how rude some people were back then in tech-related boards, this was not a unique Perl thing. I'm advocating for pointing people to the sources of information they're looking for.
> You've made my shitlist
Well then I hope it's posted somewhere I can refer to at will so that I don't have to ask you on a message board like a noob.
the entire tech industry is driven by humans and we're really bad at everything. once the AIs take over things should be much better, except for the occasional hallucination.