Re: Lua Tutor List

[Ross Bencina <rossb-lists@...>]

Hi Patrick,

On 22/02/2013 2:45 AM, Patrick wrote:
> I mentioned this a couple of years ago but want to give it another shot
> as I now have a different reason.
>
> I have found this list a bit intimidating, formal and fairly tense at
> times.

People with strong views and intense writing styles are everywhere. My 
experience here (mainly lurking) is that the list is open to a wide 
range of topics both in-depth and relatively superficial. I recommend 
putting your concerns aside and just go ahead and post your questions in 
your preferred style. People will most likely respond in kind. I doubt 
you're alone.

Anyway, the main reason I'm responding is to propose a possible 
alternative solution to a tutor list: subject tagging with automated 
filtering. A while back I participated in the piclist -- a very high 
bandwidth list for people programming pic microcontrollers. Participants 
range from newbies who don't know how to wire up a basic power supply 
circuit (me at the time) through to professional EEs making mass market 
products. Piclist was/is very supportive and was able to to sustain the 
diversity of expertise and topics. Everyone was in the same "room" so 
you could get a range of views (as opposed to ghettoizing the beginners).

Part of the mechanism of the piclist is a subject tagging scheme: they 
have a standard list of subject line tags and you can filter them either 
in your client or in your mailman subscription settings [1]. Here we 
could go with something like for example:

[HELP] requests for help with lua programming problems
[ANN] announcements about projects, libraries etc
[BUG] language bug reports
[LANG] language design
[SYNTAX] bitching about syntax
[SYNTAX-NEQ] not equals operator (ok, just kidding...)
[OT]

This is just an example tag set, not really a proposal. I'm not actually 
sure what the best tag set should be here. Probably best to look at [1] 
for a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Best wishes,

Ross

[1] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist