Comment by daneel_w
3 days ago
No reason to not say it plainly: he was regularly a total dickhead to people asking for help. But, also, he always gave people first-class expert help. They just had to "pay" by taking a bit of verbal abuse.
I spent over a decade in #perl on freenode/libera and saw so many abusive events that I eventually got tired of hanging out there, mostly due to him but in part also due to a handful of others displaying similar behavior. All the same I was always grateful for how tirelessly he spent so much of his personal time providing help, and I'm sad to learn of his passing.
Well yes, he was a total dickhead to people who asked lazy questions and could not answer the follow-up questions that they were asked. He was strict about teaching people that it is important to be able to explain one's problem clearly and follow debugging instructions, and was ruthless with people who didn't get that. On the "help" irc channels we saw a continuous flood of lazy people wanting quick solutions to their coding homework and after a while anyone would become sick of it.
I didn't much enjoy it when I was at the other end of it though, and sometimes he went too far. "Try to understand why the person doesn't understand" wasn't something he did enough -- sometimes the person doesn't know the right questions to ask, they just know that their thing doesn't work.
As a helper, it's hard to find the right balance, and I think the most important thing is that if you're getting emotional about it, step away and let someone else take the question. (I at least have been getting better at this over time.)
Yeah he always had the option to just not answer, rather than shower verbal abuse at people and push them away from the community. I only visited one or two times and that was enough, same for my colleagues.
> he always had the option to just not answer
That makes sense if they're just visiting the channel sometimes. But I'm guessing they saw themselves as somewhat responsible for the community and quality of discussion in the channel, and then just walking away isn't really a solution.
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I don't think lazy questions deserve ire. One always has the option of spending 10 seconds simply helping someone, instead of spending 30 seconds on insults. He invariably gave everyone the full 40 seconds.