Re: Regular Expression help please

From: Eric Bohlman (ebohlman_at_omsdev.com)
Date: 10/05/04 

Date: 5 Oct 2004 11:01:18 GMT

"ZafT" <deja_nospam_@zaft.com> wrote in
news:0-udnc9ioNSfzv_cRVn-og@comcast.com:

> Third, i just didn't have a perl interpreter (and can't install one
> without nazis breaking down my door) on that box and am not allowed
> ftp, ssh, or telnet access from where I posted from. I really thought
> that it would be an easy one to figure out. I mean, really - if
> there's a group of people that use regular expressions a lot, here
> they are. Any other group would give me a blank stare. I may have
> picked the wrong group, but not the wrong group of people.

[I'm making more of a general observation here and not trying to single you
out personally, since you are by no means the first person to make this
mistake on Usenet]

I've come to the conclusion that one of the most common, if not *the* most
common, sources of friction in technical Usenet groups is the fact that
many people simply have no sense of just how much they're taking for
granted when they ask a question. In this case, for example, it was quite
obvious to the OP what the limitations of his environment were, but there
was *no* realistic way anyone reading his post could have known about them.
In fact, if he had *explicitly* stated those limitations, his query would
have been *much* better received here (even if most of the responses took
the form of "I can't help you out").

It would seem that the _reductio ad absurdum_ of taking things for granted
would be asking "my program doesn't work. What's wrong with it?" without
giving *any* details of what the program consisted of, what it was supposed
to do, and what it was doing that it wasn't supposed to do or what it
wasn't doing that it was supposed to do. And yet we get *exactly* that
several times a week!

Asking other people to help you solve a problem is very much like
delegating a task to someone else. When you do something yourself, you
take into consideration a whole bunch of "background knowledge" that you
often aren't even explicitly aware of. But when you ask someone else to do
it, they won't be able to (at least not to do it well) unless you
*explictly* state all the background details. That's part of the reason
why there's such a common perception that "if you want it done right, you
have to do it yourself" (another reason is that we tend, without being
consciously aware of it, to forgive our own slipups more than other
people's; this is part of a more general tendency that's so universal that
psychologists call it "the fundamental error of attribution").

And similarly, when you need someone else's help with a problem, you really
need to (if the someone else is going to be able to give you meaningful
help) make a *conscious effort* to determine which "background details" are
important and which aren't, and to *state the important details
explicitly*. If you don't make such an effort (and it *is* an effort, and
it doesn't come "naturally" to anybody), then you will almost certainly err
by omitting the very details that point to the solution (in fact, making
the effort often results in your solving the problem yourself because it
makes you aware of things that you overlooked).

Now you've got to realize that this phenomenon (posters asking questions
that could only be answered by a mind-reader) happens *so* frequently here
that anyone one poster who does it might well be the "straw that broke the
camel's back" for whoever is reading it. A very tall person who blew up at
the first person to ask him "how's the weather up there" would indeed be
oversensitive and ill-tempered, but he'd have to be a saint not to show at
least some signs of annoyance when he hears it for the twentieth time since
he woke up and it's still three hours until lunchtime.

BTW, when we ask someone to show what they've tried so far, we're not being
snotty. It's just that we don't want to waste our time suggesting "try
this" only to hear "I already did." And for that matter, until we know
what you tried, we have *no* way of knowing how those attempts could have
gone wrong.

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