[Haskell-cafe] Re: Building the community

[Rick Moen]

Back on December 14, Conrad Parker write:
> On 15/12/06, Nicolas Frisby <nicolas.frisby at gmail.com> wrote:
> >   2) The "welcome to the mailing list" message could say "if you're
> > new to Haskell, please check this FAQ first". I'm talking big letters
> > here; I'd even be OK with <marquee>.
> 
> .. hence I'd caution against such a rule. Part of the reason this
> community is welcoming is because there is no such barrier for people
> new to Haskell to ask questions. Everyone has a different mathematics
> ability and programming experience, and an ambiguously posed question
> is often just scratching the surface of what someone really wants to
> know. It's great that this community recognises that and responds
> accordingly.
> 
> By contrast, many technical communities follow the advice of a
> document called "How to ask questions the smart way" by Eric Raymond
> and Rick Moen [0].

That would be the guy I shave.

> Although it contains some useful advice for individuals who want to
> find the answers to simply definable technical questions, imposing
> that advice on people who ask questions often ends up being elitist. 

I just re-read the essay (which some love, some hate, and I personally
find too verbose to be useful), and find no suggestion therein that
anything whatsoever should be "imposed" on querents.  Nada.  Rein du tout.

> At best, answering questions (the smart way ;-) should be thought of
> as taking part in a mathematical dialogue, not as a game of wits where
> the original poster is only given one chance to precisely formulate
> their question.

I'll be glad to send US $100 to Conrad if he show me where Eric's and my
essay suggests the latter -- as a bug bounty.



> For an example from that document:
> 
>   What we [hackers] are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who
>   seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before
>   asking questions.  People like that are time sinks -- they take
>   without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on
>   another question more interesting and another person more worthy of
>   an answer. We call people like this "losers" (and for historical
>   reasons we sometimes spell it "lusers").
> 
> I hope the Haskell community never adopts such an arrogant tone.


It's unfortunate that Conrad saw fit to cut out the explanatory comments
that immediately _follow_ that quoted passage:

  We realize that there are many people who just want to use the
  software we write, and who have no interest in learning technical
  details. For most people, a computer is merely a tool, a means to an
  end; they have more important things to do and lives to live. We
  acknowledge that, and don't expect everyone to take an interest in the
  technical matters that fascinate us. Nevertheless, our style of
  answering questions is tuned for people who do take such an interest and
  are willing to be active participants in problem-solving. That's not
  going to change. Nor should it; if it did, we would become less
  effective at the things we do best.

  We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer
  questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we filter
  ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people who
  appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more
  efficiently, on winners.

  If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or arrogant, check
  your assumptions. We're not asking you to genuflect to us -- in fact, most
  of us would love nothing more than to deal with you as an equal and
  welcome you into our culture, if you put in the effort required to make
  that possible. But it's simply not efficient for us to try to help
  people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be ignorant;
  it's not OK to play stupid.

  So, while it isn't necessary to already be technically competent to get
  attention from us, it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude
  that leads to competence -- alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an
  active partner in developing a solution. If you can't live with this
  sort of discrimination, we suggest you pay somebody for a commercial
  support contract instead of asking hackers to personally donate help to
  you.

  If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the
  losers. You don't want to seem like one, either. The best way to get a
  rapid and responsive answer is to ask it like a person with smarts,
  confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one particular
  problem.

In my world, a highly public essay that prominently says "most
of us would love nothing more than to deal with you as an equal and
welcome you into our culture" -- and explains the most effective way to do
so -- would qualify as the exact polar opposite of "elitist".

Elitism would be the _lack_ of such an essay.  It would be, for example,
a happy, positive-thinking, nurturing-feeling online environment where
people nonetheless seldom effective help because nobody bothered to tell
newcomers the truth about how to go about it.

Eric and I tried to tell exactly that truth.  We were blunt because
bluntness _works_ in exactly the way that tiptoeing around important,
key facts completely fails to work.  (I submit that, if you're a busy
technical expert and claim you don't filter ruthlessly and bypass poorly
framed questions in favour of answerable and thoughtful ones, you are
probably not being honest with yourself, as the trait is pretty nigh
unto universal.)

Sometimes, when you tell relevant truths, many people don't want to hear
them, listen selectively if at all, and then call you names.  Oh well.

I note that Conrad's objection to Nicholas's suggestion of a FAQ pointer
is that it would be a "barrier to asking questions".  Huh?  A suggestion
in the welcome message that "if you're new to Haskell, please check this
FAQ first" would tend to deter people from asking questions?  How does
that work?  The suggestion's going to reach over and bruise their
fingers?

This does reveal one of the many hazards of writing documentation (in 
addition to http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-documentation):
Some people are hostile to the effort.  Oh well.  To quote the late Kurt
Vonnegut, "So it goes."

-- 
Cheers,            If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, there's going
Rick Moen          to be one big-ass fight over where to set the thermostat.
rick at linuxmafia.com                       -- Jim Rosenberg, in The Monastery