in reply to Consideration of the Monk Trademark

Do you think monk-sites of other topics would dilute the power of this site, or do you scratch your head in frustration when using other resources wishing there was a linuxmonks, or c++monks, I have searched in frustration not find the idea of perlmonks mock sites in other venues.

I don't think anything would "dilute the power of this site" as you put it.

On the other hand, I don't find myself frustrated wishing that there were analogs to this site for other languages or technologies. In fact there are such sites even if their quality isn't what you've come to expect here.

I think the crux of the issue is that this is a community. We share something in common here. Perl. Communities form around commonality. It just so happens that the Perl community grew up with Perl the language. Its origins, being non-commercial, fostered a strong "gift society" (as tilly once put it I think.) The result is that giving advice, help, instruction, and so forth are the social norm in this community. The Perl community isn't unique in this sense but it is a little more grounded in those ideals than, for example, the C++ or Java communities.

I think your idea is good in principle but in practice, these communities will only be as helpful as the participants anyway. Putting the word "monks" on the end of a technology's name isn't going to result in increasing the quality of the assistance available to people using that technology.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
  • Comment on Re: Consideration of the Monk Trademark

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Re: Re: Consideration of the Monk Trademark
by elusion (Curate) on Oct 11, 2002 at 00:17 UTC
    Its origins, being non-commercial, fostered a strong "gift society" (as tilly once put it I think.) The result is that giving advice, help, instruction, and so forth are the social norm in this community.
    The "gift culture" actually applies, as mentioned, not only perl, but hacker-dom in general, as talked about in the Hacker FAQ (How to Become A Hacker). Written by the maintainer of the Jargon File, it's a very good read. Perl is more of a hacking language, which probably explains why its community is so giving.

    elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

[reply]
      Perl is more of a hacking language, which probably explains why its community is so giving.

      What do you mean by "Perl is more of a hacking language?" Before you answer, I understand that you are using the term hacker in its original sense. Even so, I think it's hard to claim that one language is more of a "hacking language" than another.

      I think the reason the community is so giving is because its original contributor and primary benefactor, Larry Wall gave us Perl, our reason for existing together as a community. He set an example. I do agree, however, that he certainly wasn't the first to do so. The hacker culture which fostered Perl1 is indeed rooted in these principles. I also agree that the term "gift society" applies to a wide range of overlapping communities of which ours is only one.

      1Larry was working at JPL when he first wrote Perl. I did a co-op there in the mid-90's and found the hacker culture was alive and well. :-) 
      -sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
[reply]
        I knew I'd get a question about this, but for some reason I said it anyway. :-)

        I can't claim to know lots of programming languages, or that I am fluent in the ones I know (~5 or 6). But, I find perl has a certain ability to flow; it has a feel to it.

        I've tried other scripting languages. Python doesn't have the expressibility and doesn't always seem consistently built. Ruby's nice, but doesn't have all the power. Lisp dialects can be useful, but I couldn't see myself writing a large application in one of them.

        Compiled languages just aren't the same. I find that they too can lack expressibility. Not to mention some of the more low level things you can get tripped up in. And no eval?

        I guess it's the fact that you can do pretty much anything in perl, even if you should't necessarily. It has advanced features that let you do cool stuff. Backtracking through the regex world, for example. Or maybe obfu's, like Camel Code.

        Granted, perl has its quirks. Some things are unreasonably hard, but that's changing.

        elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

[reply]

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