Personal opinion and personal plea here on practices for experts to follow on a beginners' list. Please take it in its intended constructive spirit from someone who's been teaching Perl for 11 years.
Follow the old adage of "be strict in what you emit and liberal in what you accept." In particular, this is not the forum to claim that your personal preference in some idiom is the one true way to code and that all others are wrong. The touchstone to use here, I would say, is that if you know that one or more people of recognized stature on P5P or valued elsewhere in the community holds a well thought out contrary viewpoint, then recognize that yours is just one way of doing things no matter how much you may love it or believe in it. Beginners do not need to be exposed to religious wars about brace styles and the like. Fine, they need to find out about those conflicts at some point, but I would argue that they will then no longer be a beginner and they can discover such things elsewhere. It's not like they'll have any trouble finding those debates. This does not mean you need to compromise your artistic integrity by posting code in some hypothetically objective style you do not like or approve of. By all means follow your idiosyncratic style when giving out code of your own. Just allow others to post in their own style without the thread turning into a debate about said style. We can all think up edge cases and make devil's advocate arguments that since someone somewhere posted on P5P that they don't believe in use strict/warnings that must invalidate my entire case; just apply the 80-20 rule at least, please. I know we get a lot of people posting questions here that aren't beginner level but we do still have a lot of beginners and I would like to see them get the important concepts they came for without being sidetracked into some debate about what people disagree with in PBP. -- Peter Scott http://www.perlmedic.com/ http://www.perldebugged.com/ http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0137001274 http://www.oreillyschool.com/courses/perl1/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
