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Slipping away from the Perl community
- iamjustlooking 16y agoThere's another post about this from a few months ago, I guess he's been feeling this way for quite a while. http://perlbuzz.com/2010/11/think-for-perls-sake.html http://perlbuzz.com/2010/11/think-for-perls-sake.html
- class_vs_object 16y agoI like his emphasis on kindness. Imagine a forum where you could rate a post on a separate dimension of kindness/ meanness (alongside rating on the usual vague dimension of "like/ dislike")... with restriction of privileges for people who are persistently mean. :)
- mkrecny 16y agocool idea
- fleitz 16y agoIt's about manners, a please and a thank you will go far further than any cogent argument. If people don't like you they won't listen to you even if you're right. Even in geek circles logos is the last form of rhetoric to be considered.
- groovy2shoes 16y ago"And it makes me sad that Perl loses because of it." Perl loses for lots of other reasons than profanity and verbal abuse.
- rjbond3rd 16y agoOh the irony.
- jrockway 16y agoAh yes, Andy Lester: the only person who has ever banned me from contributing to his open source projects. What a role model for civil interactions.
- moxiemk1 16y agoI'm sure there's some deep context to that - could you share/link? Claiming that kind of experience juxtaposed with an article like this screams of the importance of us drawing our own conclusions rather than taking either of your words for it.
- jrockway 16y agoI forget. I was giving him patches for HTML::Tidy, then some whining occurred on IRC, then he "banned" me. Wish I still had the logs, but it was like 4 years ago.
- urbanjunkie 16y agoEither be prepared to give us some verifiable context or just don't post a comment like this.
- erez 16y agoa: he just did, and b: let the users here decide what's suitable or unsuitable to comment here. This is exactly what Andy Lester is talking about.
- urbanjunkie 16y agoa. Is "I forget [snip] wish I still had the logs" verifiable context? b. I'm a user, and I don't think his comment was suitable. How else can users express whether or not they find a comment suitable unless they say so? In a nutshell, I don't think people should fling around implicit accusations of hypocrisy without some form of evidence that can be verified.
- guelo 16y agoIt must be a tough world out there for the overly-sensitive.
- guelo 16y agoWow, it seems I've gotten about a -11 karma for this comment so far, I guess pg must have removed the -4 limit. So apparently people believe that the world is just great for the overly-sensitive. Weird. Anyway, here's your chance to downvote me a second time!
- socillion 16y agoMy perception is that people downvoted you because your comment was a mean spirited shot which contributed absolutely nothing to the discussion, not because they disagreed with you.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- urbanjunkie 16y agoThe irony of a whine about other people being over-sensitive...
- guelo 16y agoHow was I whining? I just made an observation about the amount of downvotes, I thought the change in the voting system was interesting. Not whining but it looks like I've burned about 40 points here.
- pyre 16y agoThe more insensitive one is, the more overly-sensitive everyone else seems.
- pstack 16y agoA problem is, however, that the post seems to tie a lot of things into the idea of "too much". Yes, it's nice if people are open and welcoming and don't make a community unwelcome. Especially if you want that community to grow or remain healthy. However, foul language isn't verbal abuse. Criticism isn't verbal abuse. Being terse isn't verbally abusive (we all know the way certain developers can respond to something you say or ask and make you feel like a completely idiot and a child, but that doesn't mean they're abusive). Part of being a mature adult is understanding the difference and recognizing what is and isn't an attack and recognizing what is and isn't just someone being a prick. That said, I haven't participated in the Perl community for years, so for all I know it is now on the level of an XBOX Live Chat in a Call of Duty game which may be what he's talking about. However, I kind of doubt it is that bad.
- BasDirks 16y agoThis guy says tired a lot. If you're tired, take a nap. When you wake back up, the world won't seem such a horrid place, and you'll be able to get back to making cool software again instead of lamenting.
- pyre 16y agoHe's basically experiencing burn-out with respect to the Perl community. I'm confident that if "taking more naps" was a cure-all for burn-out, then burn-out wouldn't be such an issue. Aside: I don't think that he was being literal in his use of the word 'tired.' I don't know if it was intentional or not, but you're response comes off a bit like this: person 1: I'm sick and tired of dealing with these issues! person 2: If you're sick, then you should see a doctor!
- BasDirks 16y agoI meant to say that when shit starts getting to you, it can help to get away from it for a bit.
- scythe 16y agoI'm throwing my tantrum all the way to Hacker News! Here's to bitter angst and indiscreet not-quite finger-pointing.
- pyre 16y agoIf you accept trolling, flamewars, and abrasive personalities as just the cost of doing business, then what is any different about tantrums?
- scythe 16y agoHypocrisy. There's nothing more pathetic and annoying than and "I'm leaving" blog post. They always take the same format: a bunch of complaints leveled against nameless individuals (but they know who they are, that sort of thing) and lip service to the author's pet peeve that nobody else cares about. I mean, it kind of started off with a big invitation to please roll your eyes: 43? 43 is not that old. You're tired of all "the arguing"? Stop arguing. But let's start at the end, because that's where the meat of this post is. "I'm tired of seeing cool new projects and realizing I will never use them, because I don't want to be associated with key members of the communities surrounding them." This is stupid. He's tired of acting like a petulant child, he says. "I'm tired of those unable or unwilling to see outside their blinkered little world, and to think that others might think differently, and to think that their feelings might matter." So he writes a blog post and put a reddit vote-me-up on the side. "I'm tired of having to delete comments on Perlbuzz because the commenters can't manage to make a point without slinging insults at those with whom they disagree." You moderate a community. It's not a status position, it's a job. If it's too much work, you can quit. Nobody will hate you for it. People quit staff positions in the big communities I'm a part of all the time; they usually stay in the community and they're just tired of taking care of it. It's fair, and it doesn't require a rant. Obviously he's not happy with the state of moderation on perlbuzz, but that's something best taken up with the rest of the staff "hey $name, we should crack down on insults more" not the community at large. When moderators do this, it ends up making the whole community look bad. That shouldn't surprise you, because "making the community look bad" is clearly the intent of his little rant here. He's mud-slinging. "That means less contribution, technical and otherwise, from me, and from the others who have shared the same concerns with me regarding their own contributions." What's funny is this is probably the kind of status game he's complaining about up above. The people who are the most profane and arrogant in a community are none-too-rarely the people who estimate highly the value of their contributions (be they commensurately brilliant a la Gregory House or otherwise). I'm sure -- I don't know the guy, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt -- I'm sure Andy Lester has made some pretty valuable contributions to the Perl community in the past. So, yes, "Perl loses because of it." This little ending touch is apparently Mr. Lester's way of totally disclaiming involvement in the situation; he's absolutely refusing to take responsibility for leaving. And Perl loses because of it. Now on to the totally unrelated personal quest that nobody cares about he tries to make it applicable to the situation. >I'm tired of hearing that profanity in written communication doesn't matter because hey, it's just words, man. This is a curveball. How do you think this little unrelated tidbit made it in to the post? I mean, what does it have to do with anything? As far as I can tell, it's clearly a reference to some other argument. It's an argument he also probably lost, because nobody keeps complaining and carrying on about the arguments they won. It's lame to bring it up while complaining about the general attitude of the Perl community towards each other. <tangent> It's also an argument where, if you ask me, he's totally wrong. Profanity - fuck, shit, cunt, piss, asshole, cocksucker - the complaint is leveled against those who say these are "just words", and perhaps "just words" isn't a very good description. Profanity is more like noise. Its effect when added to a sentence is to make the rest of the sentence louder. It has no intrinsic kindness or meanness to it. Some of the best parts of life are "fucking awesome"; the worst are "fucking terrible" or even "fucking shitty". So it's a part of the English language, and it gets plenty of use in text because there aren't many ways to make text "loud". It's a natural human instinct to talk louder when you're angry or excited, and complain as much as you will that instinct really isn't going anywhere fast. Even those who abstain from "fuck" and "shit" find other ways to amplify their statements, be it through an excessive use of formatting (bold formatting is both louder and more visually offensive than italic formatting), plenty of symbolic annotation (by surrounding words with -dashes-, \asterisks\, /slashes/, or _underscores_), or abuse of grammatical conventions (these are too numerous to list, but include writing every word on it's own line, Capitalizing Every Word In The Sentence, putting. a. period. after. everything., or the dreaded "allcaps"). To me, it's pointless and silly and even elitist in some cases to argue over how precisely this amplification of textual communication is done. To draw a distinction between the guy who peppers his sentence with "cunt" and the guy who murders my linefeed with his Enter key is disingenuous, and to exile those who don't use whatever a community's "preferred" amplification style is insular and xenophobic. Profanity ranks quite low on the scale of offenses here, because it is perhaps the easiest to ignore and I'd rather see it than most of the alternatives. </tangent> A bit of background: I'm not a part of the Perl community; I have scant knowledge of Perl but as far as I know it's a fine language used and maintained by plenty of talented individuals and I've heard Moose is really cool though I can't make head or tail of it. I do, however, know pathetic when I see it. EDIT: I hope this isn't too personal. The main point is not "I hate Andy Lester" -- just please don't ever imitate what he's doing here.
- owls 16y agoThe first sign of an idiot on the internet is self aggrandizement. Look for it. Avoid these people like the plague. Also whenever you speak on the internet, screen what you say for signs of it. If you see any, revise what you were about to write, or don't click submit. Often I find myself writing a diatribe and then moving my mouse over to the submit button and hesitating, then closing the window. If I can do it, you can too!
- AndyNemmity 16y agoAgree with him totally. Really like him a lot from #perl, he's an incredible human being.