Firstly, I would definitely like to second the group hug! I'd say best
learning community on the net, that I know of.
On 5/24/11, Ketil Malde
The point is that at face value, being rude and arrogant may drive away naive questions, but is much more likely to result in endless threads of discussions of etiquette, usually laced with ample amounts of hostility. This actually decreases signal to noise.
Also it not only drives away the naive questions, it drives away the people asking them. People who might at some point become informed, contributing members of the community.
It also drives away people who don't know if their question is naive or not. When you don't want to be yelled at, you have a strong tendency to err on the side of not asking. This slows down learning significantly, and decreases the number of people who can answer others' questions in the future.
Some people quit haskell-cafe for other (better policed?) forums, so perhaps we are too liberal? I hope not.
Does anybody know how much this has happened? I'm very interested in how we can maintain this amazing resource as Haskell's user base grows. Will the same etiquette work when we start to get lots of questions from Java programmers? :) Tom