10 ms·

The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct enforcement

h2odragon 5y ago
> After spending a day wading through the stated reasons and back stories of these high-profile resignations, it's difficult to come to any single, clear conclusion—although "burn this entire pile of serpents down, with the most primal of magics" is frankly tempting. Excellent article. Why does there have to be a singular "Perl community" and Foundation for it? Usually we get schisms and "Thrice Reformed" vs "New Revelation" groups sprout over differences of opinion that rise to intolerable levels. Very similar to the "why shouldn't a project be forked" question; i get the feeling that forks are frowned on more severely now than in the past; but I can't see why. Recall Xemacs and ecgs, among others? Forks work or they die without bothering anyone.
- giancarlostoro 5y ago
  Don't forget Remacs which is kinda interesting if it goes anywhere reasonable.
- myWindoonn 5y ago
  Xemacs and ECGS were technical forks. The issue here is whether the n-word should be allowed in tarballs and git configuration. Gotta be honest, I don't have a problem with the "no" argument, and the "yes" argument is explicitly racist and empty-headed.
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    The "git configuration" that you mentioned is about his personal dotfiles in his personal git repo. It has nothing to do with the perl community. > and the "yes" argument is explicitly racist and empty-headed. If you are dismissing any possible "yes" argument before it is even made as "racist and empty-headed" I would say that you have withdrawn yourself from public discourse.
    - myWindoonn 5y ago
      Please, go on; what is the rationale for a project to publish tarballs with the n-word in their URL? I won't dismiss your argument out of hand; we'll inspect its history and evidence together, and we'll come to a consensus. Seriously, look in a mirror sometime; read what you've posted as if it were posted by somebody else. Are you excited for the argument that you've prepared for yourself?
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        There's no real rationale, of course. It's just trolling. But the kind of reaction we're seeing from the Perl community is just as disappointing. The worst possible reaction to a blatant trolling attempt like that is to make a huge deal out of it. Just remove the trollishly-named packages and revoke the person's CPAN commit access until they grow up and apologize for wasting everyone's time. Everything else is just pointless.
        lizmat 5y ago
        FWIW, I would put the actions of the committer for 90% in the area of trolling. The committer is a great proponent of free speech, and uses this to prove that there is no free speech anymore (and choose his friends accordingly). The fact that this may or not be true, doesn't matter to him. Nor that he damages the Raku community with this (as well as the Perl community). However, that this even applies to TPF / the Perl community, is mostly mr. Riedel work, using this trolling for his own agenda (which is reforming The Perl Foundation). The matter has been dealt with within the Raku community already. And Mr. Riedel should know that. Now, there is that final 10%. Whether the committer knows this or not, he does show some other tendencies that could be considered racist. But in a country like the Netherlands, that is still trying to deal with "Zwarte Piet" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet) this is sadly not as uncommon as it should be.
        h_anna_h 5y ago
        > he does show some other tendencies that could be considered racist Do you have some specific examples and had the Perl community informed him about these?
- Grinnz 5y ago
  There doesn't, and most of this doesn't actually affect the Perl community or development at large.
- mst 5y ago
  There really isn't such a singular thing. The Perl Foundation is a non-profit that handles grants and conferences (and I'm sad to see their work on the latter has regressed since I helped get a code of conduct in place for american perl conferences close to a decade ago). It has no authority over core development - that's the Perl Steering Council. It has no authority over conduct in core development spaces - that's the perl5-porters code of conduct which has its own moderation team attached (of which I am not a member but respect the people who are as effective moderators and also nicer people than I am). It has no authority over irc.perl.org in general or libera.chat #perl - those are handled by the irc.perl.org code of conduct with a moderation team that I helped recruit after taking the lead on the community consultation part of the code of conduct adoption process, but is far from only me and intentionally includes more than one person who will disagree with me quite vocally on the (sadly more common that I would like) occasions when I fuck up. What we need to do going forwards is to get conduct enforcement at the TPF/CAT level up to the standard the rest of the community has been reaching for years.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The Swiss Army Chainsaw Massacre ....
superkuh 5y ago
So... a completely non-programming issue is causing a bunch of non-programming members of the community and one programming member to leave. Bye, I guess.
- criddell 5y ago
  Did you read this part: > In March of this year, Patrick Spek—a former member of the Perl 6 (Raku) steering council—committed to .config/git/config with a commit message saying "Get a job" followed by the n-word. Sebastian Riedel lodged a complaint with TPF board, which he says was railroaded by a board member—therefore, Riedel quit. Is a commit message a programming issue? If that kind of conduct is accepted, I don't think I'd want to be associated either.
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    For him that word has a different meaning and interpretation than to you. > committed to .config/git/config In his personal dotfiles repo.
    - geofft 5y ago
      That's not how words work. The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        Like pronouns?
      - gwright 5y ago
        It would be nice if definitions were well-known and stable but there seems to be a significant number of people working against that ideal in favor of definitions that are malleable and curated (some might say policed) by various preferred groups. IMHO, this is the source of quite a bit of division of late.
      - 5y ago
okareaman 5y ago
Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. I think it worked pretty well because it refocused people on the code. It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it. I could be wrong, but it seems now people feel obligated to make a public stance on social media or email lists. Some of it is genuine outrage, some of it is virtue signaling, etc... but the effect is that the perpetrator is backed into a corner in embarrassment at public shaming. It's difficult to come back from that. I would dread being a young person now and live in terror of saying something stupid about trans issues or do some cultural appropriation I was unconscious of and be "called out" in a public manner.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. That's not the way I remember it.
  - okareaman 5y ago
    YMMV - I worked at Microsoft and then at various startups in California. Maybe West Coast culture was different from yours.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it. I think the pre-internet nostalgia of a proper “informal mediation process” is about as genuine as believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state. That said, it’s funny you turn to “trans” issues as some powder keg when the article is about whether a committer should be allowed to push something along the lines that says “ni—-er get a job” to CPAN. I can’t think most professional communities would have caused a stink about that on their mailing list
  - okareaman 5y ago
    > believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state. Did I say "hardline"? No, that's your word. Of course there isn't a hardline. It's an ideal that we try to maintain. It's a stated goal that we can all read in black and white. We have lawyers and constitutional scholars to mediate disputes over this stated goal. > it’s funny you turn to “trans”... “ni—-er get a job” I don't know why this is funny. Or are you saying that you are offended I even brought it up?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
calvinmorrison 5y ago
"the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less. Seen it time and time again. I don't have answer to the situation in general. "Code of Conduct" of course only exists when people have an interest in working together - which GNUesque projects seem to be more focused on. Relatedly I observe opposite behaviour the plan9 related community generally - where everyone basically maintains their own patch trees. If you don't want to deal with other people or your changes aren't getting upstreamed for some political reason - it's not a big deal. You can just mail your patches to some friends and they'll use it. In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. At the same time, these 'hackers' and major contributors should stick to their own medicine. If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. There's no reason to say something offensive, if your goal is to get a better quality code out there. If you think someone is a @$#%(@% or a piece of @$#%#@ or whatever cartoonishly evil phrase you want to use, who cares? just focus on the code.
- sennight 5y ago
  > If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. That might be good advice if the aggrieved could ever be satisfied, but they cannot. You will not be left alone, you must rename all your git "master" branches to "KuntaKinte".
- mahkoh 5y ago
  >In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. The primary purpose of CoCs is to enforce power relations. For example, apple plainly committed misconduct when they unilaterally bullied the W3C into not adopting SPIR-V as the shader language for WebGPU. The implicit threat was that they would simply kill WebGPU by not making it available on iOS where they have the browser monopoly (which itself is a violation of good conduct.) All other browser vendors, game engine vendors, and users supported the adoption of SPIR-V but in the end Apple got their way and WGSL was created as a bespoke shader language for WebGPU. (Naturally afterwards many post-hoc justifications were invented for this move.) Users and game engine vendors were quite upset at this because they now have to learn and implement a new shader language. When they expressed their discontent, those complaints were quickly and forcefully shut down with reference to the CoC (which apparently does not apply to Apple.)
IshKebab 5y ago
I'm mostly amazed that enough people still use Perl that they have a board and a community action committee and a "pumpking" whatever that is. Also, I feel like characterising this as a CoC enforcement issue is a bit misleading - after reading the article this isn't really about the same thing as the backlash to CoCs (like not using preferred pronouns or whatever). This is just straight up abuse and racism. You don't need a CoC for that.
- bitwize 5y ago
  As I recall, there used to be an item -- a stuffed pumpkin -- that worked like the conch in Lord of the Flies at one Perl hacker's site to control who was authorized to make backups. It served as sort of a physical advisory mutex: only the holder of the "backup pumpkin" was allowed physical access to the tape drives to prevent multiple backups from happening at once. In the Perl community there is only a notional pumpkin but similar rules apply. Only the person who holds the "patch pumpkin" could merge submitted patches into the mainline Perl tree. The duty of pumpkin holder, or "pumpking", rotates periodically, I guess to prevent the perceived issues with a single BDFL approving changes for all time.
tailius 5y ago
Maybe it needs to be as simple as "be a professional, not a dick" rule that community communications on all mediums should steer towards substance and cannot get into low-T behavioral patterns like personality attribution, judgements, or emotional language leading to animosity, disrespect, conflict, or flaming. Technical debates strongly-encouraged.
tailius 5y ago
Does LW have an opinion?
Grinnz 5y ago
This article seems to be highly misinformed. The Perl Foundation is not The Perl Community. Sebastian Riedel and Curtis Poe are still very much involved in the community and development of Perl. Elizabeth Mattijsen and Samantha McVey have not been involved in the Perl community for quite some time. Mattijsen is heavily involved in the Raku development and community, and likewise remains so after this resignation from TPF. Sawyer X resigned from the Perl Steering Council, not TPF, and as such is the only one here that actually was related to the development of Perl. Regardless, Perl development continues apace under the newly redesigned governance described at https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov, which has nothing to do with TPF.
- Grinnz 5y ago
  My comment saying this on the article has now been downvoted enough to hide it. I guess they don't care about the article making actively false statements like "The Perl community is in a shambles due to disputes concerning its (nonexistent) Code of Conduct, its (inconsistent) enforcement of community standards, and an inability to agree on what constitutes toxicity or a proper response to it." and "At least five extremely senior Perl community members have resigned from their positions and/or withdrawn from working on Perl itself"
- Grinnz 5y ago
  The article has now been updated to correctly indicate that other than Sawyer, these events are specifically regarding TPF and not the community as a whole. Thanks to the author for clarifying things.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> Ultimately, the presence of toxic elements—whether racist, sexist, or just plain aggressively bullying—in a community of any real size is perhaps inevitable. More to the point, the fact that basically every online community eventually develops these behaviours makes it look like everyone on the internet is an asshole.
lizmat 5y ago
> In a recent interview with The Register, McVey said, "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling toxicity in the Perl community." This was not stated by McVey, but by me: > "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling the toxicity in the Perl community," Mattijsen told The Register, "I'm doing my best to make sure that the Raku community will not allow individuals to create a toxic atmosphere without being challenged for what is now decades."
oblib 5y ago
The Perl community has always had a core group of arrogant jerks bickering with each other and blasting users they considered beneath their status. When MacOS X was first released I asked a question about that on the MacPerl list and was told to "fuck off" because my question was "off topic". I ended up requesting a new mailing list for MacOS X be created and it was. For the first year or two it grew very fast and it was a pleasure to be a part of it, but then some of the Perl "elite" started joining it. Randal Schwartz was among those who did and he was a complete jerk. He started trashing members on that list who'd been there helping others, including me. There were even developers who worked for Apple there, and Randal trashed them too. I finally told Randal to "fuck off" and to my surprise there were a lot of members who stood up with me, and off Randal did fuck. It wasn't too long afterwards Randal screwed himself but good with his own arrogance. It was around 2006 that I started using prototype.js to handle a lot of the things I was doing with Perl and not long after I unsubscribed from all the Perl mailing list I'd been on. Nowadays all those Perl mailing lists are pretty much silent and I'm pretty sure the MacOS X perl list is dead. I still admire Larry Wall though. He stayed far above that bullshit and remained friendly and humble when Perl was at it's pinnacle back around 2000-2005 and .cgi scripts were pretty much the backbone of web work.
sto_hristo 5y ago
Perl was the most horrible thing i've ever experienced on a job. Never again.
- mst 5y ago
  I'm sorry. Much though I love perl, terrible perl really is truly terrible to work with. On behalf of those of us who're aware that if perl was a tool it would have black and yellow stripes down the side ... we've all also encountered the sort of perl that would make you think such a thing. With great power comes great capacity to screw all of the pooches.
tpoacher 5y ago
Two equally revealing red flags indicating a potentially "toxic" project: 1. Absence of an informal Code of Conduct 2. Presence of a formal Code of Conduct.

> After spending a day wading through the stated reasons and back stories of these high-profile resignations, it's difficult to come to any single, clear conclusion—although "burn this entire pile of serpents down, with the most primal of magics" is frankly tempting. Excellent article. Why does there have to be a singular "Perl community" and Foundation for it? Usually we get schisms and "Thrice Reformed" vs "New Revelation" groups sprout over differences of opinion that rise to intolerable levels. Very similar to the "why shouldn't a project be forked" question; i get the feeling that forks are frowned on more severely now than in the past; but I can't see why. Recall Xemacs and ecgs, among others? Forks work or they die without bothering anyone.

giancarlostoro 5y ago
Don't forget Remacs which is kinda interesting if it goes anywhere reasonable.
myWindoonn 5y ago
Xemacs and ECGS were technical forks. The issue here is whether the n-word should be allowed in tarballs and git configuration. Gotta be honest, I don't have a problem with the "no" argument, and the "yes" argument is explicitly racist and empty-headed.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  The "git configuration" that you mentioned is about his personal dotfiles in his personal git repo. It has nothing to do with the perl community. > and the "yes" argument is explicitly racist and empty-headed. If you are dismissing any possible "yes" argument before it is even made as "racist and empty-headed" I would say that you have withdrawn yourself from public discourse.
  - myWindoonn 5y ago
    Please, go on; what is the rationale for a project to publish tarballs with the n-word in their URL? I won't dismiss your argument out of hand; we'll inspect its history and evidence together, and we'll come to a consensus. Seriously, look in a mirror sometime; read what you've posted as if it were posted by somebody else. Are you excited for the argument that you've prepared for yourself?
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      There's no real rationale, of course. It's just trolling. But the kind of reaction we're seeing from the Perl community is just as disappointing. The worst possible reaction to a blatant trolling attempt like that is to make a huge deal out of it. Just remove the trollishly-named packages and revoke the person's CPAN commit access until they grow up and apologize for wasting everyone's time. Everything else is just pointless.
      - lizmat 5y ago
        FWIW, I would put the actions of the committer for 90% in the area of trolling. The committer is a great proponent of free speech, and uses this to prove that there is no free speech anymore (and choose his friends accordingly). The fact that this may or not be true, doesn't matter to him. Nor that he damages the Raku community with this (as well as the Perl community). However, that this even applies to TPF / the Perl community, is mostly mr. Riedel work, using this trolling for his own agenda (which is reforming The Perl Foundation). The matter has been dealt with within the Raku community already. And Mr. Riedel should know that. Now, there is that final 10%. Whether the committer knows this or not, he does show some other tendencies that could be considered racist. But in a country like the Netherlands, that is still trying to deal with "Zwarte Piet" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet) this is sadly not as uncommon as it should be.
        h_anna_h 5y ago
        > he does show some other tendencies that could be considered racist Do you have some specific examples and had the Perl community informed him about these?
Grinnz 5y ago
There doesn't, and most of this doesn't actually affect the Perl community or development at large.
mst 5y ago
There really isn't such a singular thing. The Perl Foundation is a non-profit that handles grants and conferences (and I'm sad to see their work on the latter has regressed since I helped get a code of conduct in place for american perl conferences close to a decade ago). It has no authority over core development - that's the Perl Steering Council. It has no authority over conduct in core development spaces - that's the perl5-porters code of conduct which has its own moderation team attached (of which I am not a member but respect the people who are as effective moderators and also nicer people than I am). It has no authority over irc.perl.org in general or libera.chat #perl - those are handled by the irc.perl.org code of conduct with a moderation team that I helped recruit after taking the lead on the community consultation part of the code of conduct adoption process, but is far from only me and intentionally includes more than one person who will disagree with me quite vocally on the (sadly more common that I would like) occasions when I fuck up. What we need to do going forwards is to get conduct enforcement at the TPF/CAT level up to the standard the rest of the community has been reaching for years.

dredmorbius 5y ago

The Swiss Army Chainsaw Massacre ....

superkuh 5y ago

So... a completely non-programming issue is causing a bunch of non-programming members of the community and one programming member to leave. Bye, I guess.

criddell 5y ago
Did you read this part: > In March of this year, Patrick Spek—a former member of the Perl 6 (Raku) steering council—committed to .config/git/config with a commit message saying "Get a job" followed by the n-word. Sebastian Riedel lodged a complaint with TPF board, which he says was railroaded by a board member—therefore, Riedel quit. Is a commit message a programming issue? If that kind of conduct is accepted, I don't think I'd want to be associated either.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  For him that word has a different meaning and interpretation than to you. > committed to .config/git/config In his personal dotfiles repo.
  - geofft 5y ago
    That's not how words work. The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      Like pronouns?
    - gwright 5y ago
      It would be nice if definitions were well-known and stable but there seems to be a significant number of people working against that ideal in favor of definitions that are malleable and curated (some might say policed) by various preferred groups. IMHO, this is the source of quite a bit of division of late.
    - 5y ago

okareaman 5y ago

Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. I think it worked pretty well because it refocused people on the code. It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it. I could be wrong, but it seems now people feel obligated to make a public stance on social media or email lists. Some of it is genuine outrage, some of it is virtue signaling, etc... but the effect is that the perpetrator is backed into a corner in embarrassment at public shaming. It's difficult to come back from that. I would dread being a young person now and live in terror of saying something stupid about trans issues or do some cultural appropriation I was unconscious of and be "called out" in a public manner.

bigbillheck 5y ago
> Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. That's not the way I remember it.
- okareaman 5y ago
  YMMV - I worked at Microsoft and then at various startups in California. Maybe West Coast culture was different from yours.
nemothekid 5y ago
>It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it. I think the pre-internet nostalgia of a proper “informal mediation process” is about as genuine as believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state. That said, it’s funny you turn to “trans” issues as some powder keg when the article is about whether a committer should be allowed to push something along the lines that says “ni—-er get a job” to CPAN. I can’t think most professional communities would have caused a stink about that on their mailing list
- okareaman 5y ago
  > believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state. Did I say "hardline"? No, that's your word. Of course there isn't a hardline. It's an ideal that we try to maintain. It's a stated goal that we can all read in black and white. We have lawyers and constitutional scholars to mediate disputes over this stated goal. > it’s funny you turn to “trans”... “ni—-er get a job” I don't know why this is funny. Or are you saying that you are offended I even brought it up?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

calvinmorrison 5y ago

"the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less. Seen it time and time again. I don't have answer to the situation in general. "Code of Conduct" of course only exists when people have an interest in working together - which GNUesque projects seem to be more focused on. Relatedly I observe opposite behaviour the plan9 related community generally - where everyone basically maintains their own patch trees. If you don't want to deal with other people or your changes aren't getting upstreamed for some political reason - it's not a big deal. You can just mail your patches to some friends and they'll use it. In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. At the same time, these 'hackers' and major contributors should stick to their own medicine. If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. There's no reason to say something offensive, if your goal is to get a better quality code out there. If you think someone is a @$#%(@% or a piece of @$#%#@ or whatever cartoonishly evil phrase you want to use, who cares? just focus on the code.

sennight 5y ago
> If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. That might be good advice if the aggrieved could ever be satisfied, but they cannot. You will not be left alone, you must rename all your git "master" branches to "KuntaKinte".
mahkoh 5y ago
>In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. The primary purpose of CoCs is to enforce power relations. For example, apple plainly committed misconduct when they unilaterally bullied the W3C into not adopting SPIR-V as the shader language for WebGPU. The implicit threat was that they would simply kill WebGPU by not making it available on iOS where they have the browser monopoly (which itself is a violation of good conduct.) All other browser vendors, game engine vendors, and users supported the adoption of SPIR-V but in the end Apple got their way and WGSL was created as a bespoke shader language for WebGPU. (Naturally afterwards many post-hoc justifications were invented for this move.) Users and game engine vendors were quite upset at this because they now have to learn and implement a new shader language. When they expressed their discontent, those complaints were quickly and forcefully shut down with reference to the CoC (which apparently does not apply to Apple.)

IshKebab 5y ago

I'm mostly amazed that enough people still use Perl that they have a board and a community action committee and a "pumpking" whatever that is. Also, I feel like characterising this as a CoC enforcement issue is a bit misleading - after reading the article this isn't really about the same thing as the backlash to CoCs (like not using preferred pronouns or whatever). This is just straight up abuse and racism. You don't need a CoC for that.

bitwize 5y ago
As I recall, there used to be an item -- a stuffed pumpkin -- that worked like the conch in Lord of the Flies at one Perl hacker's site to control who was authorized to make backups. It served as sort of a physical advisory mutex: only the holder of the "backup pumpkin" was allowed physical access to the tape drives to prevent multiple backups from happening at once. In the Perl community there is only a notional pumpkin but similar rules apply. Only the person who holds the "patch pumpkin" could merge submitted patches into the mainline Perl tree. The duty of pumpkin holder, or "pumpking", rotates periodically, I guess to prevent the perceived issues with a single BDFL approving changes for all time.

tailius 5y ago

Maybe it needs to be as simple as "be a professional, not a dick" rule that community communications on all mediums should steer towards substance and cannot get into low-T behavioral patterns like personality attribution, judgements, or emotional language leading to animosity, disrespect, conflict, or flaming. Technical debates strongly-encouraged.

tailius 5y ago

Does LW have an opinion?

Grinnz 5y ago

This article seems to be highly misinformed. The Perl Foundation is not The Perl Community. Sebastian Riedel and Curtis Poe are still very much involved in the community and development of Perl. Elizabeth Mattijsen and Samantha McVey have not been involved in the Perl community for quite some time. Mattijsen is heavily involved in the Raku development and community, and likewise remains so after this resignation from TPF. Sawyer X resigned from the Perl Steering Council, not TPF, and as such is the only one here that actually was related to the development of Perl. Regardless, Perl development continues apace under the newly redesigned governance described at https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov, which has nothing to do with TPF.

Grinnz 5y ago
My comment saying this on the article has now been downvoted enough to hide it. I guess they don't care about the article making actively false statements like "The Perl community is in a shambles due to disputes concerning its (nonexistent) Code of Conduct, its (inconsistent) enforcement of community standards, and an inability to agree on what constitutes toxicity or a proper response to it." and "At least five extremely senior Perl community members have resigned from their positions and/or withdrawn from working on Perl itself"
Grinnz 5y ago
The article has now been updated to correctly indicate that other than Sawyer, these events are specifically regarding TPF and not the community as a whole. Thanks to the author for clarifying things.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> Ultimately, the presence of toxic elements—whether racist, sexist, or just plain aggressively bullying—in a community of any real size is perhaps inevitable. More to the point, the fact that basically every online community eventually develops these behaviours makes it look like everyone on the internet is an asshole.

lizmat 5y ago

> In a recent interview with The Register, McVey said, "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling toxicity in the Perl community." This was not stated by McVey, but by me: > "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling the toxicity in the Perl community," Mattijsen told The Register, "I'm doing my best to make sure that the Raku community will not allow individuals to create a toxic atmosphere without being challenged for what is now decades."

oblib 5y ago

The Perl community has always had a core group of arrogant jerks bickering with each other and blasting users they considered beneath their status. When MacOS X was first released I asked a question about that on the MacPerl list and was told to "fuck off" because my question was "off topic". I ended up requesting a new mailing list for MacOS X be created and it was. For the first year or two it grew very fast and it was a pleasure to be a part of it, but then some of the Perl "elite" started joining it. Randal Schwartz was among those who did and he was a complete jerk. He started trashing members on that list who'd been there helping others, including me. There were even developers who worked for Apple there, and Randal trashed them too. I finally told Randal to "fuck off" and to my surprise there were a lot of members who stood up with me, and off Randal did fuck. It wasn't too long afterwards Randal screwed himself but good with his own arrogance. It was around 2006 that I started using prototype.js to handle a lot of the things I was doing with Perl and not long after I unsubscribed from all the Perl mailing list I'd been on. Nowadays all those Perl mailing lists are pretty much silent and I'm pretty sure the MacOS X perl list is dead. I still admire Larry Wall though. He stayed far above that bullshit and remained friendly and humble when Perl was at it's pinnacle back around 2000-2005 and .cgi scripts were pretty much the backbone of web work.

sto_hristo 5y ago

Perl was the most horrible thing i've ever experienced on a job. Never again.

mst 5y ago
I'm sorry. Much though I love perl, terrible perl really is truly terrible to work with. On behalf of those of us who're aware that if perl was a tool it would have black and yellow stripes down the side ... we've all also encountered the sort of perl that would make you think such a thing. With great power comes great capacity to screw all of the pooches.

tpoacher 5y ago

Two equally revealing red flags indicating a potentially "toxic" project: 1. Absence of an informal Code of Conduct 2. Presence of a formal Code of Conduct.