[OT or at least CULTURAL] The attitude of a question (Was: Re: 10 LOC program is too complex to be compiled

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 4:56 PM, Peter Hickman
<peterhickman386@googlemail.com> wrote:
> The Lua community is much more technically adept than average bunch of
> programmers and as such I expect a little more self investigation before
> asking a question. Simple ones like "Why does the number of local variables
> I declare affect which part of the table assignment errors?" or "Why does
> Lua not assign a local variable only once?" raise themselves after only a
> brief time spent playing with luac -l and the original program.
>
> There are other variants of the original program, such as one where there
> are thousands of 0s, before the nested table. The fact that it is 50
> elements before the nested table is a red herring and one that would be
> quickly found. Likewise why is it the inline nesting of a table that
> triggers the error and not when it is added as a separate step "a[#a] =
> {1,1,....1}"?

When I'm beat my head against a problem, my question will sound snippy
and my thoughts will be confuse, in part because I will have moved six
steps away from my real problem and on to something that is *way* over
my head. That's why I believe that even if this guy read the source
code line for line, he would have gotten nowhere, if he had something
wedged in his mind that was blocking him from seeing the solution.
He'll sound like a person that has tried everything except the one or
two things that would have worked and he will be cranky.

Helping is the important work that we're engaged in here. The emotions
that people carry with them when they need it are part of that work.
It does not excuse bad behavior, but that was not present, here.

I think it is probably okay to ignore the brash-y-ness question, in
the name of "we've all been there before."

That said, compared to other open lists, Lua is a standout. It is
refreshing to see humanity doing this well!

-Andrew