Re: The perverse vibe of lua-l

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 08:02, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
>> > Then you don't read the Scala mailing lists. They even have one
>> > (scala-debate) for such discussions!

> Now that's a great idea.

> lua-help        lifeline for newbies
> lua-announce    moderated, followups to one of the other two lists
> lua-debate      when busy, read this in digest form only if at all

> In fact, such a great idea that it must have been suggested before.

I don't think that this idea is that a good.

One of my recurring tasks is to teach Lua to newbies (who come to work
with our code). The more newbie questions I see, the less chance for
me to forget what newbie usually thinks about the language and how it
works.

I'm perfectly fine with newbie questions asked here, at lua-l. And I'd
say that the mailing lists are not so popular among newbie kind of
people nowadays. A central place for all Lua talk would attract them
much more than a separate list.

Even if we'd have a newbie list, we will get most of the questions
asked here. And then we will get a lot of posts "Bah! You, newbie! Go
to the other list!", which is rude and not good for the community.

That being said, my opinion is that newbies should be guided to the
stackoverflow.com as much as possible. It has much better
googleability and all the necessary means to get instant
knowledge-base article from a question.

Maybe we should even enter newbie questions (along with answers) there
ourselves. See that R people did:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/stack-overflow-flash-mobs/

Alexander.