How Not to Ask a Question

I received this email last week. I often get random email from people I don't know asking for help with Perl problems and I'm happy to help whenever I can (although I always point our that Perl Monks is going to get better answers in less time).

But if you're going to ask random strangers for help, you should probably make a bit more effort than this person did. I've reformatted it and corrected the English.

Hello sir,

I am new developer in perl scripting language using MVC Frame works, my doubt is how to write below query in MVC.

$query = "select belarc_update_dt
           from   Device
           where  belarc_update_dt  >  $expiry_date
           AND    belarc_update_dt <= $current_date
           AND    (scrapped_on > $current_date
                   OR scrapped_on = '0000-00-00')";

the above query how to write in mvc frameork can we please help me sir,

Thanks and Regards

How would you reply to mail like that?

Update: I asked which MVC framework he was using. He replied:

I am using CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser' with linux shell.

At that point I gave up.

This entry was written by Dave Cross, posted on June 10, 2010 at 1:34 PM , filed under . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

3 Comments

  1. pozorvlak
    Posted June 10, 2010 at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Reply

    I sometimes feel like that with the framework I'm currently using: my knowledge of the underlying concepts is so poor that I can't even form coherent questions :-(

  2. frankwales.com
    Posted June 10, 2010 at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Reply

    I bet, with enough comedy callbacks, you could use CGI::Carp as an MVC framework, but the resulting code would look really weird. Even for perl :-).

  3. frioux
    Posted June 10, 2010 at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Reply

    LOLOLOL

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