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What's wrong in your example is that you supply no reasons to pay attention to you, then fly into a rage when you are not paid attention to. A better way would
by Daniel_Newby 17y ago
What's wrong in your example is that you supply no reasons to pay attention to you, then fly into a rage when you are not paid attention to.
A better way would look something like this:
Grasshopper: I'm trying to parse out the td tags in this HTML and I can't get the regexp right
Master: HTML allows many variations. Making a regex to handle all possibilities is too hard.
Master: Instead use HTML::TableExtract. You can learn to use it faster than you fix all the tricky problems in a regex.
- mst 17y agoSure. And in the IRC channel where that sort of question is common, we have a factoid that points this out, politely, with plenty of links. However, your point that the example sucks is good; I've fleshed it out somewhat (and still consider it representative of what I'm attempting to describe)
- Daniel_Newby 17y agoThat's more reasonable. Still, why do so many seekers-of-wisdom do that? Is it fear of the documentation, which can be pretty intimidating for a novice? Are they truly, seriously lazy gold brickers? Are they just thick? If it is the first, what they need is reassurance and a very simple, unintimidating example. I wonder if there is a market for teaching chatbots? They'd have a hard time being worse than the endless "tutorials" on the web.
- mst 17y ago"factoid" - one of our best tactics for avoiding non-constructive grumpiness has been to teach the chatbot descriptive but firm responses to some of the most common mistakes. In a lot of cases, as I note elsethread, I think it's often that they've been locked into tunnel vision over the "solution" they're currently attempting - they have a serious case of XY problem but their self-made blinkers prevent them seeing that. A much shorter version of this drama gets played out on technical channels when one of us goes "hmm, why isn't this working?", somebody else goes "wtf are you doing that for?" and the first one goes ".... oh, FFS, because I'm an idiot". But it takes practice to be that in tune with your inner idiot.
- awnstudio 17y agoThats a particularly easy question to answer, and the answer is convenience. Most people would rather call tech-support than figure out a problem themselves. Which is not unreasonable in this fast-paced results-oriented world we live in.