The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.
Language barriers also didn’t help, you had people who could barely speak English asking questions, and unable to understand the answers. Then those people started giving answers too. I wonder if things would have been a little better with today’s improved translation tools.
"How can I read a file and split the line obtaining a pipe symbol and send it via a socket server" but the angst of "WHY DO DO YOU WANT TO DO THAT", "You shouldn't do that in X-Lang" ... well maybe because I wish to execute commands on the socket server when based on the value of the pipe.
[lindex [split $variable "|" 1]