On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:39:15 -0400, Casey West wrote: > Shortly after this mailing list got off the ground I wrote an article > trying to instigate the Perl community to embrace the idea of a safe > place for newcomers, both to Perl and programming. It's been pointed out > I was marginally hyperbolic, but only a little. My abuse of the comma, > however, has no justification. I quoted from the preface of a popular > Perl book at the time, closing my argument thusly: > > "But, paradoxically, the way in which Perl helps you the most has > almost nothing to do with Perl, and everything to do with the people > who use Perl. Perl folks are, frankly, some of the most helpful folks > on earth. If there's a religious quality to the Perl movement, then > this is at the heart of it. Larry wanted the Perl community to > function like a little bit of heaven, and he seems to have gotten his > wish, so far. Please do your part to keep it that way." > -- Preface, Programming Perl 2nd Edition > http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/29/tides.html
Thanks, Casey, for coming back and demonstrating that intelligence and politeness are not mutually exclusive. I encourage people who haven't read your article linked above to do so; it contains some excellent and concise explanations of the rationale for civil treatment of beginners. One more explanation that might help was given to me by the founder of the O'Reilly School of Technology, who I am creating courses for. He is very enthusiastic and inspiring about education, and wants to make sure all the OST courses follow his vision, and he recognizes that expertise is not the same thing as teaching ability, so he impressed upon his authors the following model. He breaks down students into a bell curve. On the right tail are the early adopters like Randal, me, Uri, Casey, and other experts we could all name. These people will learn something, anything, and everything without any external prodding; they just go off and hunt down the resources, read the manual, experiment. They're completely self-starting. The middle of the bell curve - where the most students are - contains people who learn better with varying levels of help and encouragement, ranging from a point in the right direction to more directed help from a mentor. OST courses (and Stonehenge, etc, courses) are for them. They'd be a waste of time for the people on the right tail. People out on the right tail are particularly prone to thinking that the best or only way to learn is the same way they did - self-motivated figuring things out from the manual and experimentation - and that any other approach is inferior or wrong. But it's simply not going to work for the folk in the middle of the curve, who learn a different way. Some folk on the right tail think that if they beat up the people in the middle enough, they'll migrate to the right tail - where the "right" people are. Any instances of this actually working are so rare as to be the exceptions that prove the rule. Note that this is a bell curve of learning types, *not* intelligence or ability. And as other posters have pointed out, someone can be in the right tail in one discipline, like bioinformatics, and in the middle in another - like Perl. -- Peter Scott http://www.perlmedic.com/ http://www.perldebugged.com/ http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0137001274 http://www.oreillyschool.com/courses/perl3/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
