Re: http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

optimistx wrote:
An excerpt from http://www.jibbering.com/faq/ :

2.3 What do I have to do before posting to clj?
Before posting to clj, you should thoroughly read this document.
You should also check the resources mentioned in section 3 and
the Quick Answers in section 4. Read FYI28/RFC1855
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt ,on Usenet and
http://www.jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/pots1.html . Also you
should read all appropriate posts to the clj newsgroup for
several days. Most questions come up at least once every other
day and people can get annoyed of answering them repeatedly.

--

Using two dashes at the beginning of an otherwise empty line is probably
not that good an idea as the heuristics in newsreader software may
mistake it as Outlook Express' faulty signature separator and make
presentational and quoting decisions based upon that assumption.

Above 'this document' is 62 636 bytes,

rfc1855 is 46185 bytes,

jibbering.com/... pots1.html is 61587 bytes

The number of bytes seems a superficial measure. The number of words
would be more applicable to an assessment of how long it would take to
read those documents. Average reading speed (Native English speakers
reading English; other languages may differ considerably in their
criteria for 'word' and the rate at which they may be processed) is 400
words a minute, with a range that goes as high as 2000 (and with anyone
reading fewer than about 100 words a minute probably being better off
working on other areas of their education prior to attempting to learn
computer programming). So you are probably talking about a few hours
reading (at worst) to cover those documents, and a few hours reading in
preparation for doing something new for the first time does not seem
that unreasonable to me (and particularly so in the context of computer
programming where RTFM is usually among the most valuable advice going).

and there are 28 links in section 3 (most of them seem to
a size of a book).

At least one actually is a book. But the FAQ says "check" the resources,
and an individual with a specific question may find that checking, for
example, Martin Honnen's http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/ turns up a
resource that has the potential to directly answer many questions
including the specific question at hand. They are not being asked to
read all of it, just to be aware that it exists and get a picture of the
type of assistance that may be found there, so they may assess its
relevance to their specific question.

Is there a single person in the world, who has read those
all before posting?

There certainly have been people who have claimed to, and some
indication that some of them have actually done so.

If the active writers really assume that everyone has read
and remembers the contents of those 31 collections before
posting here a single question,

I doubt that anyone has a realistic expectation that individuals who
start posting to the group have actually read the FAQ prior to posting.
There is an obvious catch 22 in expecting people who are new to Usenet
to understand that many technical groups provide FAQs in part as a guide
to appropriate interaction with the group; they often have to read the
FAQ in order to be introduced to the fact that they are expected to read
the FAQ.

On the other hand, once someone has been direct to read the FAQ
subsequent evidence that they have not done so, or are unwilling to
follow its advice, is often taken as a measure of the worth of such an
individual, with the consequences that the FAQ outlines.

The initial sections of the FAQ are advice on how best to interact with
the group. The page in the faq_notes section provides explanation of the
hows and whys and what you find there is that established conventions
and advice are, in reality, about efficiency; getting the job done, be
it asking questions or answering them, in the most efficient way
possible, with the best possible results for everyone concerned.

Consider, when you are arguing that reading the FAQ may be too much
effort to demand of newcomers, that comp.lang.javascirpt is a heavily
trafficked newsgroup with a large contingent of, more or less, regular
contributors, some of whom have been active in the group for getting on
for a decade. We average about 30000 posts per year, meaning that a not
insignificant number of individuals are volunteering (their time and
effort) to read literally hundreds of megabytes of text per year. Is it
really surprising that those individuals may prefer that material to be
presented in a form that allows the most efficient assimilation of that
considerable mass of information? And is it surprising that an
individual who would rather do their own thing instead of conforming to
established conventions is not going to be particularly popular with the
people who put that work into the group?

In a one-to-many medium, such as Usenet, and particularly when the many
include the individuals with the most knowledge and experience, and so
are the people in the position to provide the best answers, any
individual is not well-advised to act against the interests of the many,
and so not well-advised to operate in ignorance of the interests of the
many.

I do not wonder them getting annoyed.

You may be reading emotion where there is none. There are only a couple
of things that annoy me on Usenet; the individuals who want to squander
the time I can devote to the group by promoting a disregard of the
posting conventions and the individuals who repeat objectively
technically false statements after they have received detailed
corrections. Apart form that my most extreme emotional reactions to
Usenet posts are amusement on the one hand and slight irritation on the
other.

Granted some of what I write is perceived as being (negatively)
emotionally motivated, regardless of how much reasoned explanation I may
provide with it. There are individuals who will take any criticism in,
any form, as a personal attack.

On that subject, yesterday I attended a meeting of the technical leads a
nd management of the software development department of the company for
which I work to discuss the process of formal assessment of individual's
performance (the factor that determines the size and distribution of
staff bonuses). One of the subjects discussed was the peer review of the
programmer's code, which it turned out was not always happening in the
way it should because some of the programmers took any criticism of
their code so personally, and reacted with such hostility, that the
individuals charged with performing such reviews were reluctant to put
themselves on the receiving end of such an extreme response.

Personally I like critical peer reviews of my code, I think I have
learnt as much about programming through that process as I have through
all others combined. And comp.lang.javascript is one place where I have
been subject to such critical reviews, and from a wide range of
individuals with quite a spectrum of experience, opinions and
influences. That you can post code here and expect it to be torn apart
line by line (in extreme cases) is a good thing, it is a massive service
to the interested student and promotes very fast learning. That the
result may appear aggressive and hostile to the casual observer is
probably inevitable, but that does not mean that the motivations are not
to promote the best interests of the individual on the receiving end.

I apologize writing here before reading all those first.
Might come back after 5 years :)

And while you take your time to read the FAQ how many hundreds of
megabytes will the many followers of this group have read themselves in
order to provide informed responses to your questions?

Richard.



.

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