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.
> getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned
Yes! There was a lesson in that and we all missed it. That was probably one of the failings of perl. It ran into a generation of people who never knew about "man pages", or couldn't read (jk - but only somewhat: for some people reading is very hard because various flavors of ADHD, dyslexia, executive disfunction, whatever) and the man page is then useless, or they go to google first and '$|++' failed (because google was raised on python).
Better marketing of the documentation would have helped.
I would say "we'll do better next time" but then perl 6... I'm not happy with perl 6 documentation. There is a lot of it - no problem there. But it insists on living online which necessitates a hosted search function. Which is always broken. And there is still no "local doc" solution.
man I hate that always online stuff. why isn't there the comprehensive man pages thing for perl 6? rhetorical question tho, I don't have much interest in perl 6.
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.
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.
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.
You are right, Perl's docs are so unusually good that newcomers can't believe they don't need the internet to find clear answers, and go searching/asking anyway, sometimes in wrong places.
FreeBSD has the same problem: plenty of its new exploring users dismiss the most well-intentioned advice to read its excellent Handbook as a sort of joke.
I’ve seen that one firsthand! “I want to do a thing.” “That’s in chapter 5 of the handbook.” “Oh cool. Is there a substack or something that explains it?”
