Note: Because this message discusses the content of two different Perl mailing lists, it is being posted to each. Apologies in advance for any cross-posts. In his recent article on www.perl.com., "Turning the Tide on Perl's Attitude Toward Beginners" (http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/29/tides.html), Casey West writes that the "Perl community has held tight to a 'zero tolerance' policy for beginners. He cites the hostile attitude beginners face when inadvertantly posting questions that have been asked many times before, only to be flamed and ordered to go "RTFM." West goes on to describe a number of new mailing lists whose purpose is to create a more "friendly, fire-free environment to foster growth and knowledge in the masses." These lists include [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] and beginners-workers as well as new IRC channels. West's efforts are laudable. In reflecting on my own experience on Perl mailing lists over the last year, however, I began to wonder whether the problem West describes may be found in some parts of the community but not others. The two Perl mailing lists to which I subscribe (neither of which he mentions in his article) are remarkably flame-free, and I have never personally experienced hostility when posting to them. I further wondered whether there was any way of testing how hostile a particular mailing list is. I figured that a crude measure of a particular mailing list's hostility would be the frequency with which the phrase "RTFM" appears on postings to the list. I was able to research this with the aid of archives I have built up since July 2000 by using my program digest.pl, a do-it-yourself archive for digest versions of mailing lists (available at http://www.concentric.net/~Jkeen/digest/digest.zip). This program extracts individual messages from daily digests, then posts those messages to text files which track individual discussion threads. As a result of daily application of this program, I have built up a large archive of thread files for the two mailing lists, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] I first used Explorer to find all thread files which contained the phrase "RTFM" and copy them to a subdirectory. I then wrote a Perl program which opened each thread file, located each instance of "RTFM," and printed to a log the offending line of text along with the message number, subject and sender of the message. I then eyeballed the log to eliminate cases where "RTFM" was quoted in the reply to a message. We are thus left exclusively with original instances of the use of "RTFM" in postings to these mailing lists. Here are the results: List Name: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Period Tracked: July 29, 2000 - June 8, 2001 Total Digests Archived: 432 Total Discussion Threads: 3,313 Total Postings: 10,405 Threads Containing "RTFM": 19 Original Postings Containing "RTFM": 27 List Name: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tracked Since: February 23, 2001 - June 8, 2001 Total Digests Archived: 149 Total Discussion Threads: 643 Total Postings: 2,163 Threads Containing "RTFM": 3 Original Postings Containing "RTFM": 3 By our crude measure, the tone of the discussion on these two Perl mailing lists appears remarkably civil. "RTFM" appears in significantly less than one percent of the postings to the lists. On the Perl-Win32-Users mailing list only two contributors appear to be repeat offenders. (I'll withhold their names because, setting aside their occasional use of "RTFM," they are frequent and generous contributors to the list.) My hunch is that if your impression of the Perl community is shaped largely by contact with newsgroups such as comp.lang.perl.misc, you would agree with Casey West that the community is hostile to beginners. West does not cite comp.lang.perl.misc by name, but I have avoided that list and have directed even newer students of Perl away from it. (Since I've avoided it, I haven't archived it, so I can't measure its hostility by the frequency with which "RTFM" appears thereon.) I applaud the efforts of West and his colleagues to create more user-friendly spaces within the Perl community and will start checking out those spaces myself. Jim Keenan Brooklyn, NY [EMAIL PROTECTED] June 9, 2001 _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/listinfo/perl-win32-users
