On Fri, 2007-13-07 at 12:11 +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

* Give tips on how to answer questions

        Answering politely, and in detail, explaining common misunderstandings
        is better than one word replies.

I can give one added tip, though, that is an opposing force which has to be balanced against this "in detail" meme. A pattern I see a lot in computing, but especially in esoteric computing (which Haskell is, still) is a newcomer asking a question and getting a response from the community, as the result of continued conversation within it (and not with said newcomer!), that looks astonishingly like this:

http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

While it is understandable, given the intense interest most grognards of any language have in playing with the language, for people to enjoy conversations that go into the ever-more-esoteric, it is decidedly not helpful to the newcomer striving to understand things. So yes: Answer politely. Explain your answer in detail suited to the perceived level of the asker. Clear common misunderstandings. But do not use this as a launchpad into the geek equivalent of language knowledge oneupmanship. It confuses far more than it helps. If you really need to enter into the game, branch out. Don't even reply to the thread but start a new thread with your reply. Leave the newcomer to the comprehensible side, even if it is perhaps somehow less than "perfect" by whatever standards you choose to measure perfection in.

--
Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> (GoogleTalk: ttmrichter@gmail.com)
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. (Richard Pattis)