I think some of these questions are beyond my “simple attempt” threshold. One of things I like about Julia is that it is not a programming languages for full-time programmers only, so occasionally there will be things you find straightfoward or simple to find out, but others may not share this view, and hence this community. I just hope you would be slightly nicer to non-programmers when answering their naive questions 
; I noticed you have a very strict attitude.
Thanks anyways.
I agree. The only example of that in the above list is the license one and I did give a short description of the general idea about it and that’s about all what I personally know about licenses as well.
These has nothing to do with non-programmers but asking questions in generl. As a rule of thumb, always googling it before asking. And if doc exists, search it too. Naive questions are fine since there are many of them that is not well documented for whatever reason. Questions with an answer that’s googleable is not fine.
With all due respect, but I guess another rule of thumb is, if you don’t like a question, save yourself the effort of writing a condescending answer.
No that doesn’t apply. There are questions that are valid but I don’t like or know the answer and I will certainly not give an reply. However, your questions clearly showed that you didn’t spend any effort in finding out an answer first yourself. Such behavior is a waste of everyone’s time and does not deserve an answer from anyone. This is the default rule at basically all online Q&A sites and we should include that explicitly if not already. It is certainly fine to not following this rule for the first time which is why I gave the links to those easy to find answers in additional to letting you know why what you are doing is not appropriate. It seems that you are still not seeing doing simple research as a necessity though.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Julia and Github
Having participated in a number of different open source communities over the years, I can understand and sympathize with both sides of the discussion here…
On one hand, if I am learning “X”, it is comforting to know that there is a community around “X” that I can turn to for answers, even if there may have been other means of finding those answers. Google is not for Julia only, and so if I am someone just starting out with Julia, it’s hard to know whether the answers Google turns up are the “right” ones for me.
That said, I have personally left certain project mailing lists because they eventually became flooded with “newbie” questions. It definitely is possible for the noise to drown out the signal, and so I think it is only reasonable to expect newcomers to do at least a little homework first.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is attitude and (here’s the kicker) attitude is nearly impossible to convey unambiguously on the internet. This is doubly true when you consider that in a diverse open source community, most people will not share a common “mother” tongue. What this leaves us with is the unfortunate situation where, almost always, the attitude we perceive is being communicated by someone else online is actually our expectation of that person’s attitude.
The solution, then, is quite simple: always assume positive intent. Assume that any perceived bad attitude is merely a miscommunication. If you are new, try to act with humility. Respond to facts first, attitude last (or not at all). Do this, and you’ll find the internet becomes a much friendlier place.
FWIW, it’s usually pretty easy to tell if something is julia related or not. Especially since some can be found in the julia doc so there shouldn’t be any ambiguity for whether it’s julia related or not. This includes import, travis, appveyor, REQUIRE and README. Putting things in one place is nice and that place is the doc. If you did a google search and it’s not obvious to you if the answer is relevant or if you did a doc search but you couldn’t find it or interpret the doc then it’s certainly fine to ask and such questions are especially welcome when then point out the sources they’ve seen and what’s the confusion, that’ll help improving our doc to make them more useful and complete.
What’s important here is that you should show that you have investigated some time to find out the answer yourself and not just throw questions out hoping someone will spend their time to answer it (i.e. your small investigation in finding an answer yourself is what earns your a good answer). While maybe there’s someone that happens to be willing to answer it, it has a net negative effect for the community since it generate more noise and it’ll waste more peole more time than if the author did a simple search himself and either find the answer easily or have more directed questions other than a very broad question so answers will be more useful and the interaction will also be much more efficient. Moreover, if such behavior is not being discouraged/stopped, it will encourage people to repeat this and in the long term discourage people from using the doc (i.e. the proper way) and making it harder to search for an answer.
This is not really related. I think the solution for this is tagging. You can filter out First steps (I hope a combination of subscription option and gmail filtering can allow this…). I’m actually fine with newbie questions myself. People don’t necessarily know how to find the answer. I’m usually very willing to answer newbie questions that I know the answer of as long as it’s not clearly something googleable or searchable in the doc. Here I do assume that people are generally aware of google and the search function in the doc. I think that’s a valid assumption. If not, we should put that clearly in some discourse banner.
I did and as I said
and I believe the correct response is to point them to the right way to find the answers themselves and let them know they should not do this again and that’s exactly what I did. (And slightly OT, I prefer to point to the right way to find the answer and not give the direct answer in general when the way to find out the answer should be doable for the one asking the question. I’ll not assume someone can figure out how the GC works by themselves of course and in those cases I do also think it’s valid for someone to give a direct answer, they deserve both kind of answer equally well and some might light one way more than the other). What I won’t do, however, is
since it is important that we clearly discourage asking question without any searching first and point to the correct thing to do before asking questions, which I assume is what is being referred to as “a condescending answer”.
Speaking of wasting everyone’s time, look at how much your useless (IMHO) comments wasted and how much time my simple questions and their answers took, and you will see a clear contradiction, if you look objectively enough.
I kind of disagree with this. Good intention and bad intention can often clearly show their heads even from within broken English. I have chatted long enough with diverse enough people to know this. I am usually nice until I see clear consistent signs of rudeness then it’s a totally different attitude you will see in my words. I am pretty sure you can tell the difference by now.