in reply to Perl making people more POLITE

Sounds like wishful thinking. My galvanic response is to agree that every Java hacker I ever knew was a jerk and every Python hacker a bigot and every COBOL hacker... well, I only knew one and he was my high school comp sci and calculus teacher and he was pretty damn nice... but it's not true. I've known a couple of awesome Java hackers and far and away the most annoying, bigoted, and time wasting hacker I ever had to work with was 100% Perl. It wasn't anyone here though. I think that's part of this place's charm. It spits out people like that pretty quickly.

Sidenote: a huge number of those in prison in the US in particular don't belong there at all: Incarceration Rates . And those numbers only get more awful when you add race to the mix–

South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society. What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black men at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world? - Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment

Not to get a political thread started, just saying. How "evil" one is is not a direct function of how incarcerated one is.

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Re^2: Perl making people more POLITE
by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Sep 06, 2008 at 23:12 UTC
    That's all not to mention that 60% of US prisoners are there for so-called crimes which involve no dishonesty or violence. Drug laws in the US are a sad, unfunny joke.

    I'm not sure how that relates to programming, though, except that certain programming languages are sad, unfunny jokes, too. I won't start a flame war by naming them, and I'm sure everyone has their own favorites to name to the category anyway. Suffice it to say that Perl isn't a joke and Intercal I find funny.