o1bigtenor via Dng said on Sun, 4 Jun 2023 17:08:13 -0500


>I'm trying to educated myself on networking and am finding, so far at
>least, that this is considered specialist only country. So when I
>start asking questions I get ignored because my questions are too
>basic (so they're considered boring) yet I can't find answers.

It's not just you. The problem you identify in the preceding paragraph
haunts us all. People know the answer, but they don't bother to answer.
In this email I'll tell you how to get past that problem...

Let's say you want to create a Stanko plugin for a Yamanashi
algorithm. You ask on the Yamanashi mailing list and get only crickets.
It happens to everyone. But you take action...

Step 1: Instead of making an elegant Stanko plugin, you kludge something
together using C, Python, Bash, the Linux filesystem, LibreOffice,
Gnumeric and an ancient MSDOS program running under an emulator. All
your kludge needs to do is work. It can be slow. It can require human
intervention. And the uglier it is, the more effective for your
answer-getting technique.

Step 2: Reply to your own post asking for help, adding <SOLVED> to the
subject. In your reply post, you glowingly boast about your "solution".
Do not use the word "kludge". Do nothing to imply that your "solution"
is anything less than a work of genius.

Step 3: Remember all those people who didn't bother to answer you? Now
they jump all over each other to inform you how incompetent and stupid
you are, and how "all you had to do was ___________". Once all the
insults have come in, you pick the best of the _________'s and
implement it or a combination of several of the incoming ________'s, or
if none of them is as good as your kludge, implement your kludge.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the people on this list have seen me do this.
My method is responsible for there being a "continue" statement in the
Lua programming language.

That's right. I kept bitching that there was no "continue" statement to
restart a loop at the next iteration, requiring hellacious levels of
branching and indentation. Everyone told me there was no need for a
continue statement. So I cobbled together a Lua table based object that
did continue, and actually quite a bit of break logic and other handy
stuff.

I sent a boasting email to the list about how I'd created a continue
statement equivalent for Lua. The howling and growling sounded like a
10 dog dog fight. At one point one guy said "well, at least he proved
that we do need a continue statement", and so one was created for Lua.

In the ultimate irony, they implemented their continue statement with a
GOTO (Stevie don't play that goto game), so to this day when using Lua
I use my kludge :-).

SteveT

Steve Litt
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm