This is how I learned Haskell. I literally went to #haskell on freenode and asked "hey so what's this all about", and many veterans of the community helped me get my feet wet.

I'm not sure what kind of toxic communities and work environments you are apart of, but if a newbie to the community can't ask questions, that's not a community that will survive or flourish in the long run.

Whilst I would never be rude to a newbie, isn't it reasonable that they at least read the FAQ, README or an I tried before asking such basic questions?

Sure. But ask in gitter first. You'll receive an answer suggesting you go read the README.md as it covers this info.

That's the type of lazy behavior that drives a lot of experienced people away from some of these chat rooms. What self-respecting developer is going to waste other people's time before doing an initial search on his/her own? That's the type of person I would rather not help because their first instinct is to waste other people's time before investing their own.

I have heard other developers call them parasites and energy vampires.

Please do not recommend this.

I've never heard of people needing to ask where the project readme is, especially when your in a chatroom linked to the repo, which has it on the homepage.

On top of that, it's inefficient. I want a couple of paragraphs telling me what the project is about, not a conversation.

That seems... inefficient. Basically, instead of reading the readme, you suggest going to gitter to be told to read the readme?

I think I could streamline that process a bit.

Which you probably already could assume before, so you just wasted your AND somebody elses time. rude.

> I'm not sure what kind of toxic communities and work environments you are apart of, but if a newbie to the community can't ask questions, that's not a community that will survive or flourish in the long run.

Our definitions of toxic obviously differ a bit. I wouldn't flame anyone but (in a non paid setting of course, paying customers have the right to be wrong) I would tell them (politely) that we were there to help them when stuck, not to pull them up to speed.

Before reading this I wouldn't have believed anybody would seriously suggest that.

As others have pointed out going straight to the chat without even trying to read up on the docs first comes off as extremely entitled and lazy.

I'm maybe to hesitant, I wont bother anyone before I've read the relevant docs twice, possibly also looked quickly into the source.

I think a lot of people misunderstood my comment. I obviously understand that there are basic questions that can be answered by documentation.

But my point was that for any community to survive, it should be welcoming to newbies and have an environment where people shouldn't be afraid to ask questions, even if they are "dumb" by some arbitrary metric. It's also a good way to convince someone of using your particular framework, programming language, etc.

A newbie may ask why should I use X, and if experienced veterans of the community give set Y reasons to use it, I feel that's way more convincing than "RTFM scrub". It's way less elitist too.