Although, I find it a little sad that we have to remind each other to behave with civility.

I think the comments have gotten a little off-track in debating whether or not you should help noobs, or in what situations should you help them vs. letting them figure things out for themselves. The most important message of this post is, whether you choose to help them or not, don’t be a jerk about it.

To change all the ide is hard – but to change the doc gerator to also show the full source code its a smaller change i think.

Your suggestion that they try Googling.

I think part of the problem has to do with the balance of skills amongst people working on open source. I don’t mean the level of skill, which of course is inevitably very broad, but rather the kinds of skills being brought to bear. My impression is that most people involved in open source are essentially (surprise, surprise) coders, which of course is fundamentally essential. But not all software developers have the instincts, inclination or background to think about software from an architectural perspective and even fewer get excited about the idea of writing about architecture.

So though there may be an ocean of blog articles explaining how to solve every imaginable coding problem, there is very little documentation that attempts to describe the overall design of many software projects. And without some view of the architecture of these complex systems, it becomes much much harder to penetrate the code itself.

Its been my personal experience that the so called “noob” often ends up making extremely valuable contributions after they are shown the way. I am also fond of saying that “some people cannot be helped.” Its a two way street and if the noob is not receptive to new ideas or listening to your explanations then you are wasting your time.

Thanks for encouraging people to maintain the proper attitude. It also appears that you have inspired several so called noobs with your own noob origin story.