Draco18s, I'm not a mind-reader.
"If you HAVE a problem, start a new thread" isn't what he said.
I can figure now that could very well be what he meant, but I wouldn't have known that at the time, because as I'll try to explain later, I had the wrong idea about this whole forum.
What he actually said was...
It's a simple, straightforward command.
So I did.
Is that autistic? Yeah, maybe so. But I'd be in good company. And it's probably part of what makes me good at programming. (heh, not in Java yet obviously)
Well said, jabelar. (about that it's probably more helpful to tell people "go away, that's a basic Java issue". Well, maybe you wouldn't say it exactly like that, but yeah.)
That helps bring into focus for me the part I played in what went wrong here. Thank you.
No one told the user ravingmadlunatic that though (and he's not nearly the least knowledgeable who wasn't told that, so I imagine that's why he thought he could ask) and that's a big part of the reason why I thought his question was worthy of an answer. That mistaken sense of worthiness in its turn was a big part of why I evaluated it as acceptable to comment on an old thread (for people in the same boat).
Yeah, on the contrary, a forum team member and senior users were being very nice and helpful to that user despite him clearly not meeting the stated criteria of basic Java knowledge (such as how imports work).
Maybe those criteria weren't apparent at the time? I don't know. But the take-home message for me was, being nice to people of any skill level and helping them was the cultural norm here, and I should interpret the written rules in that light. I don't mean to say that misconception is entirely your faults, any or all of you -- after all, that's my basic assumption in general in life so I'm prone to jumping to that conclusion. Collectively, you've all surely done more than enough to correct those perceptions for me, so rest assured.
Well, I'm glad to have gotten to the bottom of it.
Looks like ravingmadlunatic finally got the message too. I'll take that "go away" as marching orders myself now, since obviously I don't have enough basic Java knowledge either.
Maybe he'll be back when he does. Maybe I will will too. Talk with you all then.
Even though it maybe didn't work out very well for anybody, nonetheless I appreciate you trying. Keep at it.
Peace.
-ziz