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For someone not up-to-date with the Perl community, could you elaborate why Matt was considered a deeply polarizing figure, please?
by kleiba 1y ago
For someone not up-to-date with the Perl community, could you elaborate why Matt was considered a deeply polarizing figure, please?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- petesergeant 1y agoHe would have been happy to tell you himself that he had some rough edges, would speak his mind unvarnished, and would hold strongly onto his own opinions of what he thought was right.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThat sounds like half this community. I suspect the issue is what those opinions were. I did not know him at all, have no opinion on him, and sincerely wish the best for those he left behind.
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- petesergeant 1y ago> the issue is what those opinions were Rarely, in fact.
- mjd 1y agoIn my life, I've only known one person who has called me a “cunt”. I'm sure Matt would have been happy to admit that he was that person. I'm sure he would have said that he had spoken his mind unvarnished, and maybe even that he thought he was right. So what? People say that a community will fall to the level of the most toxic person it will tolerate. For the Perl community, that was Matt.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- throwaway328 1y agoJust a quick word of public interest - there are countries where the "c" word is really quite a normal word amongst friends and acquaintances, male and female. When you say that you've only ever been called that once, you maybe don't realise how much cultural information you're revealing. Seriously, look up something about the use of the word in Australia, for example. Your eyes might very well be opened.
- chris_wot 1y agoI’m an Australian. Being called a cunt is still a really offensive thing to say to someone. You might jokingly call a friend a cunt in jest, but you say that to a stranger and you might have your teeth knocked out. Don’t always believe the stereotypes.
- xupybd 1y agoUnless prefixed with good. He was a good ....
- singingfish 1y agodumb, sick, stupid, other adjectives - generally not negative although could be in the right context - both in the Australian and North West England (where Matt was from) context. Just watch out for being called a fucking cunt. In almost all cases that one is pretty unambiguous. I do remember at one point having a conversation with Matt about how handling East Coast and West Coast North Americans was quite a different proposition from a cultural perspective, also related to this thread. Matt would have liked this discussion. And given that his and my mutual friend has some actual legitimate serious expertise on obscenity in the English language even more so.
- throwaway328 1y ago
- xdfgh1112 1y agoHe was pretty mean to people on irc. If you didn't immediately understand what he said he'd verbally barrage you. Then again the whole perl irc community was pretty toxic.
- windowshopping 1y agoYeah, I tried learning Perl back in 2017 and the community was the worst I'd ever encountered. The language had so many bizarre quirks and they just treated you like an absolute idiot if you didn't intuitively get it. Left it behind and never looked back.
- ether_at_cpan 1y agoHe "did not suffer fools gladly"
- IncreasePosts 1y agoEvery time I've heard that phrase used it's just describing an asshole
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- singingfish 1y agoMatt was a child prodigy, and child prodigies have it notoriously tough. He and I worked closely for a while. There is someone else important in my life that has somewhat close to mst's intellectual gifts, and similarly to mst they also have difficulty controlling their reaction to other people. However, unlike this other person in my life, mst did know how to express accountability and had been on a learning process to deal with his limitations. Matt and I never had beef, perhaps because we recognised that our respective strengths and weaknesses were complementary.
- gwern 1y ago'Child prodigy' is not an exaggeration here: https://trout.me.uk/prec/ https://trout.me.uk/prec/
- loose-cannon 1y agoYou're posting this in a thread filled with stories which paint him as an asshole.
- singingfish 1y agoand child prodigies are notorious "arseholes" QED.
- 1y ago
- the_precipice 1y ago[flagged]
- windowshopping 1y agoA comment this extreme could benefit from a source at least, or any sort of explanation of where you're getting it from. When you phrase it as if to make autism sound like an intrinsically negative personality trait, your comment is almost guaranteed to end up flagged/dead. Autism isn't a choice and not all autistic people are assholes.
- the_precipice 1y ago[dead]
- daneel_w 1y agoNo reason to not say it plainly: he was regularly a total dickhead to people asking for help. But, also, he always gave people first-class expert help. They just had to "pay" by taking a bit of verbal abuse. I spent over a decade in #perl on freenode/libera and saw so many abusive events that I eventually got tired of hanging out there, mostly due to him but in part also due to a handful of others displaying similar behavior. All the same I was always grateful for how tirelessly he spent so much of his personal time providing help, and I'm sad to learn of his passing.
- ether_at_cpan 1y agoWell yes, he was a total dickhead to people who asked lazy questions and could not answer the follow-up questions that they were asked. He was strict about teaching people that it is important to be able to explain one's problem clearly and follow debugging instructions, and was ruthless with people who didn't get that. On the "help" irc channels we saw a continuous flood of lazy people wanting quick solutions to their coding homework and after a while anyone would become sick of it. I didn't much enjoy it when I was at the other end of it though, and sometimes he went too far. "Try to understand why the person doesn't understand" wasn't something he did enough -- sometimes the person doesn't know the right questions to ask, they just know that their thing doesn't work. As a helper, it's hard to find the right balance, and I think the most important thing is that if you're getting emotional about it, step away and let someone else take the question. (I at least have been getting better at this over time.)
- rjh29 1y agoYeah he always had the option to just not answer, rather than shower verbal abuse at people and push them away from the community. I only visited one or two times and that was enough, same for my colleagues.
- diggan 1y ago> he always had the option to just not answer That makes sense if they're just visiting the channel sometimes. But I'm guessing they saw themselves as somewhat responsible for the community and quality of discussion in the channel, and then just walking away isn't really a solution.