Folks, I'm surprised and disappointed that DrHyde's comment is getting downvoted. He is correct; the throwaway bit about "some girl" feels quite dismissive and exclusionary. It may not have been meant to be, but that's the way it sounds, because "some girl, I assume" comes across to me as "I can't be bothered to remember, but since all girls like flowers, it must have been a girl; they're all the same anyway" - and I'm not even female.

"But that's not what I meant!" - possibly not, but think of it this way: if some other quality of the questioner was picked out as a description, would the sentence seem insensitive - as in, an unthinking assumption was made, and this is presented as perfectly reasonable to do? "Someone asked me about generating drum beats with a program, so they must have been black", "someone asked me about generating a rainbow, so it must have been a gay guy", "somebody asked me for a hamburger recipe, so she was an American" (two for the price of one), "someone asked me where they could find a deli, so they must be Jewish"? Any of those could be me, and none of those assumptions would be true.

All of those say, "in my mind, a person can be reduced to one thing about them, and that's fine, because nothing else is really significant about them anyway, pigeonholes are OK". In addition, the poster not remembering and falling back by default on "some girl" also says, "My standard assumed ideas about this kind of person always apply in every case, and I don't need to bother to learn anything about them past that point."

"Not thinking about this stuff is one of the reasons the majority of computer programmers are male. Even "I can't remember now, but I think a female friend asked me about this" would have been better than "some girl, I assume".

One of my female co-workers might have asked you about algorithmically-generated chainmail linking patterns. I personally happen to love flowers, especially orchids, myself. It is a lovely graphic, and in its way quite sweet, but "some girl" really spoils it for me.

In reply to Re: a 3D flower made with Perl by pemungkah
in thread a 3D flower made with Perl, for anonymous girl by zentara

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.