[prog] Asking questions here

Mary mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org
Tue Nov 1 09:27:30 EST 2005


Incidently Asli, since the kind of disjoint and context-free questions
you've been asking here (you're not explaining why you need the answers)
are going to have people asking "are these homework questions?" pretty
quickly, you might need to include a bit more information in your mails.
I suggest:

 1. why you want the answer; and

 2. where you've already looked and why you need more information.

The answer to question #1 is important, because you'll get different
answers to "what are Perl and Python good for?" if you're asking because
your company wants to write a web application than if you're asking
because you have to write an essay on it.

If you or anyone else are asking us homework questions, that's OK, but
we'd prefer that you said so, so that we can help you with the intent of
the homework, which is helping you learn how to do things yourself.
In general, people on these kinds of lists are very keen to help people
learn, but they're less keen to answer question after question when they
don't know the background about why the question is being asked.

-Mary


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