Unfortunately, that's exactly what he's coming across as doing. At least, to Ovid and myself. =)

I feel like I was led into a trap by deliberately increasingly insipient posts (roughly outlined here and here, under writeups). Suddenly, the trap designer springs forth and exclaims: "It was all a ruse! A clever game to expose your insecurity and my righteousness." That is exactly the impression I got. If that wasn't princepawn's intended message, I'd say he needs to take another shot at explaining things. He has a long way to go, in my book.

I understand your pride at making abbot, and your reasoning here. But I see nothing prideful about a site that spends all it's resources defending it's core purpose and catering to one or two individual and their seemingly inherent inability to look up anything for themselves. Instead they rant and rail, and have others do their work while not even taking a stab at the problem for themselves. As I've said before, this is excusable for newbies and monks once and a while. princepawn has been doing it on a consistent basis since May.

Nobody likes feeling conned. I implore you to prove otherwise. And I would ask princepawn to give us another explanation, one that doesn't involve scheming and veiled insults.

Conned? How were you conned? If the posts stand on their own, how did not knowing it was princepawn "con" you. How is one psuedonym ok but two are bad? More than one person on here has multiple logins (can think of two off the top of my head.) And your belief in "schemes" shouldn't require him to deny it. Prove he had a prior motive to slam perl or stop maligning him by implying otherwise. That in particular is the sort of behavior I'm objecting to, casting him as a pariah. His actions have been marginal, but calling jihaad against him won't help him improve at perl or social contact, you'll martyr him.

I'm having to fight off using religious metaphors in this discussion...

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

It's highly unlikely he'll be made a martyr. It's no reflection on him, but I don't think anyone around here cares enough. Even someone as 'famous' as abigail who was 'driven off' failed to be made a martyr.

I don't think the underlying model of how this online environment works is capable of making a marytr of someone. Martyrdom requires constant rememberance, and with the continual change of topic, and the focus on one sector, I just don't think it's feasible.

Please understand this is not a slight of princepawn, but a statement of how I feel the site works.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren

No Jihaad has been called.

No one is scheduled for sacrifice.

That said, please allow me to continue the argument.

> How is one psuedonym ok but two are bad?
I never said that. Multiple people have multiple accounts here, for whatever reason, and I could care less. It's how the first account was used that we have trouble with. I'll explain below.

> And your belief in "schemes" shouldn't require him to deny it. Prove he had a prior motive to slam perl or stop maligning him by implying otherwise.
I consider princepawn's explanation of his actions to be questionable. So do several others. The "proof" you ask for is in the pudding. I "called him out" as you say for a better explanation, a better version of Let us give thanks for princepawn shall whine no more. That's all.

> Conned? How were you conned? If the posts stand on their own, how did not knowing it was princepawn "con" you.

extremely... I'm not trying to insult you, but from that it sounds like you're missing the point entirely. I've explained my position in detail here and here. There's not a whole lot more I can add to my argument, or say to you. We've been encouraged to drop it. But because I feel obligated to argue my stance on the issue, I'm going to try again.

If a person pretends to be something he's not, for an explicit purpose involving other people, we consider that "to con." The person is a "con-artist" in that he (or she) uses a variety of emotional and mental techniques to convince the "victim" of some concept, or some opinion. Like "buy this cure-all" or "I'm not too bright, you can trust me" or "the Earth is flat." You get the idea.

princepawn has said "...being princepawn has been a keen insight into human nature." The context implies that he was masquerading as princepawn to prove a point, mainly that "certain people will attack you blindly and hatefully after awhile even if you are correct." Furthermore, he has said that his alter ego, metaperl, is "proof of [his] ability to 'go with the flow'."

From the above we can surmise the following: The two versions of the person we know online as princepawn and metaperl are inherently different. By reading their posts we can see that both are reasonably intelligent when it comes to Perl as a language, yet one seems "unable to connect the dots" as far as programming concepts and PerlMonks behaviour (researching before asking questions). From the reputations and experiences of both, we can see that one is generally well-accepted (we will call this, metaperl, the 'true' identity) and the other is not (princepawn, the 'false' identity). By true and false I mean relative to how this person is in real life. The fact of the matter may be that both are false, but for the sake of my argument I'm going to name one false and one true.

Before princepawn's revelation, we all lived in blissful ignorance, thinking that princepawn is/was a intelligent, if rude and inane at times, Perl programmer. He made outrageous claims¹ about Perl fallacies, he infrequently "did his homework" before posting a question² to Seekers of Perl Wisdom. The end result of his presence on PerlMonks was aggravation and wasted time on behalf of many monks here. Monks that would defend Perl from his attacks¹ and answer his unresearched questions.

Now we find that the false identity, princepawn, was actually a front for the true identity, metaperl. What does this mean? Well, it means that princepawn was pretending to be this intelligent, if rude and inane at times, Perl programmer, who couldn't seem to connect the dots on basic programming concepts, and never did his homework before posting a question to Seekers of Perl Wisdom. He had us all fooled into believing this. Why did he do this? To prove a point.

The end result? Wasted time of many monks, to answer the fake questions and fake claims of Perl fallicies. To prove his point, apparently.

We were conned. Swindled, manipulated, cajoled, persuaded. (From http://m-w.com.) See above for a more complete definition. Time, valuable time (my time is not valuable, so I have no trouble taking time to write this :) was wasted. All to prove a point. (Yes, I know I'm repeating myself. I'm trying to drive this point home!)

Do you understand what I am trying to say, now?

What now? Well, the way I see it, there are a few options.

1. A Better Explanation
   princepawn may have misstated a few things in his original explanation. If this is the case, a better version of his story would be swell.
2. The True Identity
   Maybe princepawn was just being himself. Maybe metaperl is really the false identity, and it took actual effort from princepawn to act so sensible and polite. In this case, the unresearched questions will continue to be asked, the attacks on Perl as a language will continue, and time will continue to be wasted. It is my ever-so humble opinion that something needs to be done about that.

I'm done. I have no more to say. This is the last post I will be making on the subject of princepawn for a long, long while. This is not my crusade, this is not my flame war. This is just my opinion. I am upset and frustrated, and now I hope you understand why.

Friar Alakaboo

---

1. Attacks on Perl

This is not a complete list, merely a sampling of recent entries.
• Apparent Inconsistencies in Perl Function Naming
  "Perl...makes consistent operations possible through highly inconsistent means."
• $PERL_USE=$PERL_USE:
  "Too bad Perl doesn't have a syntax similar to the one in my title to save me the trouble..."
• How does one return an Empty list as a return value
  "...there is no simple way for a function to return an empty list and bind this to a Perl array."
• @_0 vs. $_0
  Less of an attack than a statement of the obvious.
• late binding behavior in hash definition
  Same as above. No attack was made, but questioning of the default behaviours was implied.
• What Data::Dumper dumps is not necessarily what is there
• syntax error not detected by Perl compiler

2. Questions

Again, not a complete list, just a sampling of the questions and answers that could have easily been answered in the chatterbox, found with a Super Search, or found with a quick perusing through the Perl docs.
• Where is the constant? Where is the void context?
• eval "our $_;" for @EXPORT fails
• useless use of a constant in a void context?
• Empty list as a return value
  Asks a question that was answered from his last question!

...snidely pretending to discuss a matter when you are really attacking the person...

Don't go to Utah if your sole intent is to make fun of Mormons

Cheers,
Ovid

Update #3: I have deleted my previous updates as I don't want a flame war. I do agree with extremely's comments about downvoting past nodes to teach someone a lesson. I haven't done this and I hope no one else would.

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

Then delete the first paragraph. The rest of your post stands on it's own without sending the troops off to downvote him.

And downvote or upvote away, there is only blame in voting if you are voting the person and not the content. Which brings us nicely around to what princepawn and merlyn have both complained about. =) If you disagree with me vote the post down, don't go seek out every useful post I've made in the last 2 weeks and downvote all of them to "teach me a lesson" or some such nonsense.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)