The Lost Souls of Freenode
I originally wanted to written a more prose-like blog post about the topic of
“The Lost Souls of Freenode”, echoing some of my frustrations
from trying to help people on Freenode
channels, especially #perl
and ##programming
and
I started from keeping a list of bullets and sub-bullets and decided to keep
it this way out of being lazy. Maybe it can also be considered the blog
equivalent of some wikiHow
pages.
After I gave a link to the bullets to someone I met on Freenode, he told me he hasn't found any of what he read here surprising from his experience on IRC and as a tutor and T.A. (= Teacher Assistant) in an American college.
-
“Many Lost Souls” on Freenode's #perl - IM conversation.
-
Quote the conversation about “First rule of #perl channels” (meaning that Freenode’s #perl is our first line of defence).
-
People having problems getting indentation right.
-
People who /msg me after asking.
- Either they think that's the way to answer.
- Or they think that I cannot help them because there's another conversation.
- They're usually not willing or cannot afford to pay.
- Someone who thought that paying me 50 USD / hour for private help was too high.
-
* People who want us to write their code for them.
-
“Help me with a script I found.”
-
Often badly written.
-
-
“Help me with using a program / my operating system / etc.”
-
Not even related to coding.
-
-
- “Are you using version control?” “No, what's that?”
- Automated tests?
- A debugger?
- Old versions of perls.
-
-
Homework/scholastic constraints.
-
“We didn't study it yet”
-
“No external modules / CPAN”
-
“Not allowed to any built-in language data structures, including not arrays.”
-
Mandatory course.
-
Graded 0 once because was programmed on Python-2.7.x and tested on Python-3.3.x (on Windows).
-
-
-
One who didn't know what files are nor did file I/O.
- Ruby
- private conversation with someone else who didn't know what files are.