in reply to Re: GoodBye :-)
in thread GoodBye :-)

So I would hope that at a young age you look back at your postings from no so long ago and say "Whoa, what the heck what I thinking?!

Better yet, know what you were thinking at the time, and know objectively why your current actions are superior. Who knows, maybe you were right back then?

I think this goodbye post was mostly looking for attention and hoping that the community would come begging you not to leave

I don't think so, it seems more like he just realized it was time to move on. As for not being "Tilly or Abigail" well, that's just BS. The Perl community's (I hate that phrase) of elevating people to god-like status based on knowing regexes a little better, or posting frequently on a website (sometimes with less than helpful posts) is beyond sad. Take a careful look and you'll see that many people who you've never heard of contribute just as much (or more).

This is not meant to single out Tilly or Abigail, who both contribute a lot, more as a response to "Perl culture's" (ugh) tendency to view prominent members.

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Re^3: GoodBye :-)
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jan 06, 2003 at 14:09 UTC
    This is not exclusive to the Perl community. Every community/subculture has this tendency to idolize prominent members.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

      To an extent, yes.

      You can look at movie stars, singers, and related crud and say "See! they do it to!" You'd almost have a point, except their industry, and the IT industry (more specifically open programming) are extremely different. Their industry is looking good and being articulate, not creating intelligent solutions and contributing to a community. There are a good number of these people who do contribute, but they're rarely recognized for it.

      As for arenas similar to Perl, none I've seen come close. Guido and Matz aren't viewed in nearly the same light as Larry Wall or his underlings. You also end up with people idolized for (almost) totally useless things like obfuscation. What benefit does this possibly have? Please don't say "Learning more about the language" because there are many far, far better ways to do this. The only reason I can think of is it's some more acceptable form of "1337sp34k" designed to scare off the newbies and convince them you're better. This type of behavior should be limited to web design scum and shouldn't infect a (potentially) real language like Perl. Stick with a true meritocracy, don't bother with idolizing programming popstars.

      I think I just forgot the point to this rant, but it's probably in there somewhere.

[reply]

        Certainly true, but then, Perl seems to attract people for much more than purely technical merits. Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice, and none of these communities have an archive that has worked out so well as CPAN. Perl is about the social merits as much as about the technical ones. In such an atmosphere, it's obvious that peope will earn respect on the basis of other than just technical capacity.

        Is that bad? From a technical standpoint, maybe. Personally, I find it makes things more fun. And I'm with Linus on this one - the point of life is having fun.

        Of course there's dangers to this approach. But so are there to a pure meritocracy. No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently (though some more so than others). Perl's is not alone in that regard.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

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