On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 10:00 -0700, William Skaggs wrote:

Acually the thing that struck me was that the answer from Mitch was not only a little rude (which is unusual for Mitch), it was also a bad answer -- it doesn't make sense to download the source code just to find out what language it is written in.

Um, sorry? If one wants to know what language an application is written in and what tools are needed to build it. The immediately obvious step is to simply download it and look. Why would somebody google for that?

Now if the first thing that occurs to *Mitch* is wrong, then the question is probably not quite as trivial as it seems. In fact, if you take obvious approaches, such as googling for "gimp source code", you don't easily learn the language it is written in.

That is IMHO a totally non-obvious approach.

Moral: don't
be rude unless you *know* that the person you're answering has done something bad. (And even then, rudeness marks you as an amateur.)

Thank you. I didn't think that response was rude. Granted, it lacked a thanks perhaps. But all I said was telling the guy what *I* think is the most obvious approach to learn what he was asking for. AND to *learn* that all by himself, which is far better than just getting an answer to a trivial question.

I think we are overdoing this discussion here. There are other cases of real rudeness around. Apparently it all depends on the point of view. For example I consider it very rude to accuse somebody of not seeing somebody else as human being.

I think I'll stop contributing to this discussion for today, or I'll turn into the rude ass again...

ciao, --mitch