I started using Perl seriously only about a year or so ago. One of the first things I did was to join the beginners@perl.org mail list. There are a remarkable number of experts on that list, and I was (and continue to be) impressed with their patience and dedication.

(I would occasionally surf PM, but much of the traffic here was over my head.)

As I became more familiar with the Perl community, I kept encountering oblique references to some Monumental Event having to do with Perl beginners.

I spent some time today doing some historical research, and decided it would be worthwhile to report what I found. While what follows is probably common knowledge among monks who've been here since 2001, other monks may want to know why it is that the Perl community is as friendly to beginners as it is.

There seems to have been a sea change in the Perl community that originates with this document on perl.com by Casey West.

You should read it, now. I'll wait.

Having read that, doing a Super Search for Casey West shows some remarkable comments on the article in PM. Definitely worth reading. (Apparently, NodeReaper is a lot more gentle today than in 2001!)

OK, so what? (the Meditation part)

When I started using Perl, my mistakes were obvious. But now I know enough Perl to make truly dangerous mistakes. And I'm still enough of a newbie that I can't always tell the difference between an obvious mistake and a dangerous mistake.

If I assume that the influence of Casey West's opinions continues to inform the interactions on PM (which I do) and that PM is full of experts (which it is), then XP can be trusted, and serves as an excellent way for me to discover the difference between silly mistakes and dangerous mistakes.

That is, the amount of XP assigned to interesting questions on PM usually far exceeds the amount of XP assigned to interesting answers. Therefore I can be fairly confident that a question with high XP indicates a potentially dangerous mistake, and that a question with low XP indicates a question that probably could be answered by RTFM.

XP of course is a fun game, too. I play it by upvoting as many good answers as I find on PM. It's the least I can do.
  • Comment on Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner)

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Re: Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner)
by zentara (Cardinal) on May 02, 2004 at 12:00 UTC
    I use XP votes to indicate a few things:

    1. I found the post interesting enough to read fully and contemplate it. Usually I give a vote for good answers, but I also vote for posts that just make me think about an aspect of Perl which was new to me. Sort of like saying "thanks for posting that".

    2. I give "encouragement votes" to obvious newbie questions, because they "crave XP" as a measure of their progress in Perl. It makes them feel good and keeps them coming back, which is good for all of us.

    3. I vote for anyone who takes the time to post nice code snippets which clearly demonstrate something.

    4. I can count the "negative votes" which I've cast, on one hand. I prefer to use "positive reinforcement" than "negative reinforcemnt". If the post is lousy, I may comment to the fact, but I won't downvote it.

    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
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Re: Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner)
by perrin (Chancellor) on May 02, 2004 at 14:45 UTC
    In my opinion, that article was probably not very influential. I remember reading it at the time and thinking "What on earth is he talking about?" At most, it might demonstrate some things that were going on in one particular corner of the perl community. At the time, the Perl 5 Porters list and the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup were both fairly contentious. This probably had more to do with a few key individuals than anything else. If you look at the list back then, you'll see some pretty serious wars going on.

    People who are very involved in p5p sometimes forget how small it is. The vast majority of perl programmers don't even read it, let alone ask beginner questions there. And in 2001, newsgroups were already mostly dead for newbies. I can't speak to the influence on PerlMonks, since I wasn't here then, but I can tell you that I asked dumb (although not FAQ or un-researched) questions in various places and never got yelled at for it, and this was well before Casey's article.

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      Friendliness is partly in the eye of the beholder. You never were the kind of beginner that Casey's article was meant to improve the treatment of. You may have asked dumb questions, but you had years of technical experience before Perl and so would not take issue with terse answers that would be issues for many beginners. You may not have known the Perl answers, but you knew geek culture. There were certain common issues that you simply were not going to run into.

      Friendliness, like beauty, is partly in the eye of the beholder. Certainly as a beholder, Casey is on the sensitive side. Which I thing is a good thing in someone pointing out potential problems. For instance while we were one of the friendlier communities out there then, there were issues that grated on him.

      I'd also estimate more influence for that article than you would. Particularly when you add in the follow-up discussions here and elsewhere.

      An incidental point. Casey was not just talking about p5p when he cited problems. As discussion at PerlMonks as Ambassadors and elsewhere makes clear, he was primarily concerned about issues with other online communities, including PerlMonks. That p5p does not help beginners is not an issue because it is not supposed to. That sites which are supposed to help beginners don't is a different issue.

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      I think it was hugely influential. The beginners' list is still thriving today. QED.

      I bet I'm not the only one who uses Perl (instead of Python or Ruby, for instance) because things like beginners@perl.org, learn.perl.org, PM, etc. exist.

      In 2001, usenet was (and still is) a quagmire. (Endless September, etc.) If I were starting out and the only place to ask for help was p5p or comp.lang.perl.*, I would have found some other language. Or some other career. =)

      Beginners shake things up as much as they drag things down. Good beginners ask things that make you think twice about stuff. West took an explicit stand, and concrete steps, to both welcome and to make room for beginners in the Perl community. I've benefited from that, and lots of other people too, and so (I think) has Perl.

      Even NodeReaper is more polite than he used to be. =) (I work in software QA-- I would have enjoyed reading that reaped node from 2001. Heck, I might even repost it now, 3 years later-- except I'd be one of the first ones with a comment!)

      I had fun finding the article and reading the historical reaction to it on PM. I'm glad other folks liked it too.
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Re: Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner)
by grantm (Parson) on May 02, 2004 at 05:37 UTC
    "... then XP can be trusted ..."

    That looks like a dangerous mistake right there :-)

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Re: Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner)
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 03, 2004 at 03:47 UTC
    The NodeReaper incident that you likely found in Super Search was unusually extreme for the time, which is why I singled it out for criticism. It should not be considered indicative of what was then common, but rather indicative of a direction that I didn't think that PerlMonks should go.

    PerlMonks did not go that direction. ;-)
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