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Re^3: GoodBye :-)

by Aristotle (Chancellor)
on Jan 06, 2003 at 14:09 UTC ( [id://224631]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Re: GoodBye :-)
in thread GoodBye :-)

This is not exclusive to the Perl community. Every community/subculture has this tendency to idolize prominent members.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re: Re^3: GoodBye :-)
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 06, 2003 at 15:36 UTC

    To an extent, yes.

    You can look at movie stars, singers, and related crud and say "See! they do it to!" You'd almost have a point, except their industry, and the IT industry (more specifically open programming) are extremely different. Their industry is looking good and being articulate, not creating intelligent solutions and contributing to a community. There are a good number of these people who do contribute, but they're rarely recognized for it.

    As for arenas similar to Perl, none I've seen come close. Guido and Matz aren't viewed in nearly the same light as Larry Wall or his underlings. You also end up with people idolized for (almost) totally useless things like obfuscation. What benefit does this possibly have? Please don't say "Learning more about the language" because there are many far, far better ways to do this. The only reason I can think of is it's some more acceptable form of "1337sp34k" designed to scare off the newbies and convince them you're better. This type of behavior should be limited to web design scum and shouldn't infect a (potentially) real language like Perl. Stick with a true meritocracy, don't bother with idolizing programming popstars.

    I think I just forgot the point to this rant, but it's probably in there somewhere.

      Certainly true, but then, Perl seems to attract people for much more than purely technical merits. Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice, and none of these communities have an archive that has worked out so well as CPAN. Perl is about the social merits as much as about the technical ones. In such an atmosphere, it's obvious that peope will earn respect on the basis of other than just technical capacity.

      Is that bad? From a technical standpoint, maybe. Personally, I find it makes things more fun. And I'm with Linus on this one - the point of life is having fun.

      Of course there's dangers to this approach. But so are there to a pure meritocracy. No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently (though some more so than others). Perl's is not alone in that regard.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

        Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice

        This is an extremely dangerous thing. At first it appears great for Perl - more people attached to it, more people using it, more publicity, great. However, this leads to programmers who have only one tool and get tunnel vision. They lose objectivity and innovation is greatly reduced. You end up with people trying to do silly things that were never meant for Perl. Perl is adapted to try and make these things semi-possible, and it loses its strengths and becomes so overly broad that it is surpassed in almost every area. People keep using it only because they sort of still know how to use and it is (barely) okay for the job, but there are many better alternatives.

        I should note this is not the current situation, just a future scenario based on the current path. Hopefully a major change, such as Parrot and Perl 6 will take us down a different direction. I firmly believe better integration with other languages is the solution to this problem.

        No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently

        Well said, and as one may guess from my previous post, I don't think that the Perl community is very open to constructive criticism. It seems to deal with it in a "Flame. That's not the Perl way. Ignore" type attitude. As always, there are exceptions (such as yourself judging from your reply) but those exceptions aren't an accurate representation of the masses.

        I think CPAN is also an important part of the equation, it does lead to many mostly non-programmers being able to throw together solutions. This has its good and bad points. The good being greater access to programming, which helps improve a huge number of important skills. The bad being that if you're just throwing together solutions, you don't really learn that much and you risk doing something stupid. It does provide a decent gateway to programming though.

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