> I think people there can definitely be jerks sometimes, and I don't really like the negativity either.

> But on the other hand, not every place and community on the internet needs to be welcoming to teenagers and mentor them through the fundamentals of X11/C/Go.

> I just wish people were a bit less of a jerk about it.

I definitely agree with your point. I personally have very few hours of free time per week anymore due to work/programming/cooking/commuting/interfacing with family/etc., so I definitely sympathize with you.

To try to clarify a bit, I absolutely did not expect a bunch of internet strangers to feed me decades worth of information/experience over irc. It was more the fact that they didn't even point me in the right direction (for example, "here's why your sed-based approach won't work and here's the wiki page for lexing/parsing" would have helped me understand why my approach to that project was flawed) or provide any kind of advice at all — it was a pretty negative experience overall if I remember correctly.

While I did (at the time) read many of Rob Pike's papers and Russ Cox's Go code/xoc dissertation, the dwm/st/twm source to learn Xlib, googled most of the basics of linux/bsd/etc, read manpages, etc., there were a lot of blind spots where I wished I could have asked a mentor with extreme domain-specific knowledge to help me understand something fundamental/fill in the gaps that I was missing at the time.

For example, I remember wondering "what is the simplest/best way to format your ~/{.profile|.xinitrc|.xresources} dotfiles generically across multiple operating systems including plan9"? I found some info about this in manpages, but what really helped me learn was an obscure post by Russ Cox[0] and Aram Hăvărneanu's dotfiles[1][2] on github. I'm sure Russ or Aram could have explained this to me in a simple manner had we discussed it over email, but at that point I was already too scared to reach out to people online due to previous negative experiences.

While it is possible to learn everything from textbooks, source code, blog posts, stackoverflow, etc., the fact that we have teachers/tutors who are paid to communicate knowledge in a simple and easy to comprehend manner is really what helps people learn and retain information, in my opinion. I've always considered source code similar to textbooks and professional mentors similar to teachers. The problem is that mentors are generally only accessible through your job or through paid services online and most youtube videos cover the absolute undergrad-level basics.

I think I asked one Go question in the /r/golang subreddit ~5 years ago (apparently the go binary does not/did not work in cygwin on windows — who knew? not me; downvoted to 0) and one Go question on stackoverflow (i was writing an x-face encoder which should have operated on individual bytes rather than UTF-8 encoded byte sequences — this was nontrivial to me at the time so I think I ended up quickly implementing the js btoa() or something since EncodeToString returned replacement chars; downvoted to 0). After the second question, I never asked a technical question on any online service ever again.

Since then, I've found StackOverflow, Reddit, and irc to be too negative to really participate. I think many communities make newbies feel unwelcome, which can drive away talent and lead to those communities failing as there is nobody there to eventually replace those original talented users. It's like if you're not immediately an expert, then you are made to feel unwelcome/unintelligent in these communities. These days I just fire hyper specific google queries and almost always find what I'm looking for, but it sometimes takes time.

I think what I'm getting at is a more fundamental problem that plagues internet programming/engineering discourse in general — most mentorship/apprenticeship occurs in either proprietary or professional environments and it is very hard to propagate that knowledge in a clear and concise manner to engineers outside of your organization. Blogs help, but not everyone has the time/resources/energy to run one. Many organizations use proprietary tooling which you're not allowed to discuss externally.

I basically worry that these kind of communities can unknowingly/unwittingly/unconciously gatekeep information through in-group exclusivity and the desire to stay fashionable/different.

I've still never really been able to find a place online where simple/fundamental questions are _encouraged_. I mostly just discuss stuff with colleagues and pray that google turns up something that is somewhat related to my question.

> Then again, I have said this nicely to people a few times over the years ... One time this guy got so triggered over this that he went to several subs to tell everyone what a horrible person I was just for (nicely!) explaining that they didn't really seem to be the intended target audience ... Turns out that being a programmer means you're obliged to help strangers out on the internet, according to some anyway shrug.

That is shockingly unprofessional and creepy! I'm sorry about that. I don't even bother emailing people these days because I feel like I'm being a burden.

> That's pretty much why I use dwm; I use a hacked-up version and I somehow managed to lose the source code for that 2 years ago (not sure how...) but it's okay, because it Just Works™.

> For me, suckless is very much a pragmatical thing, not a "minimalist ideological" thing.

We are definitely in agreement here! I mainly moved from dwm to twm/ctwm because I prefer using the twm config file rather than recompiling and the fact that it provides just enough non-tiling related wm features that make me productive without feeling overwhelmed. I moved away from dwm because I also lost my config, no longer tile my windows now that I program in Sublime Text (rather than terminal emacs), and have been trying to use as many default configs/programs as possible. I've also found that tmux is sufficient for the amount of multiplexing/"tiling" I do need to rarely do.

I think the source of my "minimalist/ideological" comment was the fact that the original community where I first learned about dwm (/g/) was pretty toxic and fetishized programs as objects of fashion rather than as tools that are used to solve problems.

> It's very stable, never changes, and I never need to look at it or worry that an update will break anything or will move things around ("now where did that button go?!")

This is the way I feel about ctwm and xterm — they've been stable for like 30 years and basically never change.

This turned into kind of a long response, but I wanted to thoughtfully respond to your thoughtful response.

[0]: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.plan9/c/WHwcEe-ws4E/m/8p...

[1]: https://github.com/4ad/dotfiles/blob/master/profile

[2]: https://github.com/4ad/dotfiles/blob/c0a3ac77a072e1feb5225e2...

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If you're interested, here's what my final dwm config ended up looking like many years ago! I was a big fan of the artwiz cure font and using XQuartz/X11 rootless alongside OS X's aqua, lol. Maybe we crossed paths online at some point.

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/portfolio/desktops...