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Just give the man the fish!

Last week I complained about a Math SE pathology in which OP asks a simple question, and instead of an answer gets an attempt at a socratic dialog. I ended by saying:

I have been banging this drum for decades, but I will cut the scroll here. Expect a followup article.

Seeing this, Scott Francis remarked:

when you say “I have been banging this drum for decades" I hear echoes of EFnet #perl in the back of my head :)

And yes, that is one of the things I was thinking of.

Thirty years ago the regulars in the #perl IRC channel would play a cruel teasing game. A stranger would come into the channel and ask a simple technical question, like “how do I remove the first character from a string?”

Instead of giving the answer, two or three people would reply perldoc perlre.

In case it's not obvious — and there is no reason why it should be — this means you can run this command to get the manual for how to use Perl regular expressions.

This manual was about 20,000 words long.

People indulging in this shitty behavior would excuse themselves by chanting the maxim “If you give a man a fish, he can eat for one day. If you teach him to fish, he can eat for his whole life.” An actual answer to a question was a “fish”. Apparently, saying perldoc perlre was considered to be “teaching a man to fish.”

If the newbie objected that the reply perldoc perlre was unhelpful, the regulars were only too ready to lecture them on why it was helpful actually, on why they didn't deserve a better answer, on why they shouldn't expect their questions to be answered, on how they were being rude by rejecting the help that was offered them, on how they shouldn't feel entitled to answers, and on why the regulars there were all very busy people with more important things to do that to answer stupid newbie questions.

In my view, someone who is hanging around in #perl should expect newbie questions, and if they don't want to answer newbie questions they simply shouldn't do it, they should ignore them. If they can't do that, if they are so enraged by newbie questions that it ruins the rest of the chat for them, they should go start a different channel with a name that won't attract newbies. But they should not hang around and vent their impotent rage on the newbies who inevitably do show up.

I'm kind of an asshole, but I'm not that big an asshole. I'm callous, but I'm not sadistic. Someone who says they don't have time to help you, but who does have time to explain to you in detail why they aren't helping you, is sadistic.

“Well, we want them to learn to read the manual,” the regulars would claim. Maybe so, but I don't think their strategy was usually effective. If one really wants people to read the manual, a much better strategy would be to answer the question, and then having established oneself as a helpful person, suggest the manual:

By the way, you can get complete documentation about regexes with the command perldoc perlre. It's really long, but it's full of useful information. The ^ operator I mentioned is in the section called "Metacharacters". Would you like help finding it?

On the other hand if what one actually wanted was to convince someone that Perl was a language used by assholes and they might have better success with a different language whose community had fewer assholes, then the #perl regulars’ strategy was probably very effective.

Then as now my usual habit was to just answer the question. There would be this odd little moment where three people would say perldoc perlre and I would say $string =~ s/^.//. Did people yell at me for this? I don't remember. Probably, I was spoiling their fun.

But at least once someone asked me (in good faith, I'm sure) why I did it my way. I saved my answer. It was:

Because it's easy. Because it's helpful. Because I think the theory that says that people will become dependent on it is bullshit.

Because I think the theory that says that telling them to read the man page is more helpful is also bullshit.

Because in my experience people are much more likely to heed your suggestion to read the man page after you have established that you are a helpful concerned person by assisting them.

The main points are the first two: Because it's easy, and because it's helpful, so why not?

It's at least 25 years later and I'm still angry about this. Who the hell hangs around in a help forum for the purpose of refusing to help?

Social media now is toxic in ways we couldn't have imagined then. But let's not forget that it could be pretty toxic then too.

Addenda

“in good faith, I'm sure” is not sarcasm.

20250208

The previous addendum was also not sarcasm.

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