ugh.. I've tried not to comment on any of merlyn related nodes flying aroud here lately in hope that they would just go away. For watever reason, I'll weigh in with my two bits.

merlyn does a great amount here and I think in general for the Perl community. I think the issue can be summed up in this line of code.. 

if ($merlyn->terse) {$vote--}

[download]
Now the node in question yesterday was terse and could come across as condesending. I'd suspect it was more along the lines of how a teacher would word something to make a student think instead of just giving an answer.

I'd suspect that some people, after seeing a lot of terse posts come up with the idea that merlyn is a "heartless clod". You'd be hard pressed to find any one post that sums up your reasons though. Does someone have the right not to like him because of this? Sure. Should merlyn change? Of course not. He is who he is, and he's probably nothing like what those of us who don't know him personally think he's like.

So I don't think that the people who don't like merlyn are baseless, nor do I think that merlyn should try to change the way that he is.

In reply to Re: Question Your Opinions by rchiav
in thread Question Your Opinions by Guildenstern

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.