Andy Oram over at O'Reilly just posted an article analyzing how mailing list readers are helped or hindered in the Perl and Ruby on Rails communities. His most interesting conclusion is that many posters come without the background needed to understand answers. That is certainly been the case on the cafe in many instances. I believe if he had analyzed the Haskell-Cafe list he would have found a much higher percentage of user questions are answered, and sometimes in incredible depth. His conclusion seems to be that, for newbies at least, books and articles that lead the reader gently into the new domain is the answer. As I've learned Haskell over the last year I've found that to definitely be the case. The article is at http://praxagora.com/andyo/professional/mailing_list_follow_up He'll also be speaking at OSCON next week and I look forward to hearing what he has to say. Justin