Re: Perl "expert"

On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:34:27 +0900, Raymond Wan wrote:
Randal L. Schwartz wrote :
And I'm with Uri here... I definitely do *not* answer anything that I
haven't
had experience with, unless I preface my answer with "I think..." so
that Smarter People(tm) can check my work. If only everyone followed
that rule, life would be simpler. :)


Personally (and we're now nit-picking natural [human] language), the
fact that these words are coming from my fingers implies it's an
opinion. "I think..." is always implied unless each time I typed a
word, I asked a committee for consensus. :-)

No, it's the difference between the implication being "I think" and "I
know." When Randal doesn't qualify his information in a Perl posting, it
means he's certain, and for a teacher, author, and expert to make a public
statement with certainty means they're staking their professional
reputation on the quality of the answer and you can place an enormous
amount of faith in its accuracy.

If he (and I, and Uri) aren't certain, we'll say exactly how we aren't
certain ("I haven't tried this," "YMMV," "I heard this from a usually
reliable source," etc.) But some people post with an implied "I think,"
and that gets the people who need help into trouble, because they may
assume the impication is "I know."

Suppose you're traveling through the wilds of Scotland without a GPS and
you stop and ask directions to Loch Ness. The person answers, "Take the
fork right of the pub and follow it past the crossroads until you come to
the main road then turn left." But you end up in Aberdeen. Turns out the
person forgot to say, "By the way, I just moved here yesterday and this is
what I think the directions are based on a map on a tea towel I saw
hanging in a gift shop." Now suppose you're a local tour guide who makes
a living off giving people accurate directions. What do you think of the
advice the other guy gave?

Not a fair comparison? Randal and I as teachers know that meeting the
functional requirements is only a small aspect of the quality of code.
Perl gets an unjustified rap as a write-only language because people pass
around horrible code that "works". That code gets publicized every time
some pundit wants to claim that Perl is a bad language, and our retorts
that it is the result of poor education get lost in the noise.

--
Peter Scott
http://www.perlmedic.com/
http://www.perldebugged.com/
http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0137001274
.

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