I originally wanted to write a more prose-like blog post about the topic of
“The Lost Souls of Freenode”, echoing some of my frustrations
from trying to help people on Freenode
channels, especially #perl and ##programming and
I started from keeping a list of bullets and sub-bullets and decided to keep
it this way out of being lazy. Maybe it can also be considered the blog
equivalent of some wikiHow
pages.
After I gave a link to the bullets to someone I met on Freenode, he told me he hasn't found any of what he read here surprising from his experience on IRC and as a tutor and T.A. (= Teacher Assistant) in an American college.
“Many Lost Souls” on Freenode's #perl - IM conversation.
Quote the conversation about “First rule of #perl channels” (meaning that Freenode’s #perl is our first line of defence).
People having problems getting indentation right.
People who /msg me after asking.
Either they think that's the way to answer.
Or they think that I cannot help them because there's another conversation.
They're usually not willing or cannot afford to pay.
Someone who thought that paying me 50 USD / hour for private help was too high.
People who want us to write their code for them.
“Help me with a script I found.”
Often badly written.
“Help me with using a program / my operating system / etc.”
Not even related to coding.
“Are you using version control?” “No, what's that?”
Automated tests?
A debugger?
Old versions of perls.
Homework/scholastic constraints.
“We didn't study it yet”
“No external modules / CPAN”
“Not allowed to use any built-in language data structures, including not arrays.”
Mandatory course.
Graded 0 once because was programmed on Python-2.7.x and tested on Python-3.3.x (on Windows).
One who didn't know what files are nor did file I/O.
Ruby
private conversation with someone else who didn't know what files are.