In article <JAK.95Mar22121014@remington.cs.brown.edu>,
Jak Kirman <jak@cs.brown.edu> wrote:
: >>>>> "Simon" == Simon McIntosh-Smith <Simon.N.Smith@cm.cf.ac.uk> writes:
:
: Simon> Hi all,
: Simon> I'm hoping that someone will take a minute to help me out
: Simon> with a simple perl 5 problem. I've been unable to get help
: Simon> with it from anywhere else because most perl users I know
: Simon> are still using perl4.
:
: Join the club -- I have got no help whatsoever on perl5 from this group :-(
Let me see if I can shed some light on this. There are quite a number of
things going on here. I'll enumerate some of them, and we can let the shoe
fall where it may.
1) The traffic in comp.lang.perl has grown greatly. It used to be
that one person (me) could make sure that every question got an
answer eventually. This is no longer true. (Though I do still
read everything, and nearly all bugs mentioned here go into my
database.)
2) Over the last year I've been learning to delegate some of my
"duties" to other folks. Perl itself is now easy to extend
in various ways, so there are now more specialists.
3) Many other people now consider themselves to be Official
Answerers in comp.lang.perl. (This is good.)
4) There is no mechanism among these answerers to make sure that
every question gets dealt with. So it becomes probabalistic
whether your question gets answered.
5) An answerer is less likely to answer a question that is poorly
expressed.
6) An answerer is less likely to answer a question that ought to
have been answered by reading the fine manual.
7) An answerer is less likely to answer a question if he or she
feels that it's someone else's place to answer it, that is,
if there's a known specialist.
8) Most of the people who have already taught themselves Perl 5
are highly motivated individuals who are always stretched
pretty thin anyway, and have to pick and choose what they'll
answer.
9) These people also expect you to do your own work. If you ask
them to write your program for you, they'll balk unless the
problem is intrinsically interesting.
10) Because Perl 5 is still pretty new, much of the discussion
about it is not very interesting to Perl 4 users, so it
mostly happens in a mailing list, perl5-porters@nicoh.com.
11) Since there is a mailing list, many of the Perl 5 gurus tend
to keep up with things there rather than via comp.lang.perl.
12) An answerer may apply principle #7 when #11 applies. I suspect
this is what happened to your Tk question.
13) Messages often get lost on Usenet. Even if your message gets
to most of the net, it may not get to the person who was
"supposed to" answer your question.
14) Several people may have answered via email, but your machine
bounced all the messages that day.
15) You may have (rightly or wrongly) outraged the answerer last
week in an entirely different newsgroup. (Or someone else with
a similar name did.)
16) The person who should answer your question may be on vacation.
17) The person who should answer your question may be doing some
real work this week.
18) The person who should answer your question may be in court
this week. :-(
19) People often intend to answer a question and never get back
to it. I often mark a question to return later to see if
someone else will answer first. Then at some point I get my
fingers tangled in my keyboard and accidentally discard all the
messages I was hoping to guarantee an answer for. Or people
give up before I get a chance to go back and answer them.
20) You can just plain get unlucky, in the chaos-theory sense.
That is, you might not interest anyone in answering your
question today for no other reason than the flapping of
a pig's wings in a china shop last weekend.
Anyway, that's reality. Maybe we can fix reality one of these days.
Larry
Jesper Nilsson // dat92jni@ludat.lth.se or jesper@df.lth.se