Slipping away from the Perl community

There's nothing more pathetic and annoying than and "I'm leaving" blog post. They always take the same format: a bunch of complaints leveled against nameless individuals (but they know who they are, that sort of thing) and lip service to the author's pet peeve that nobody else cares about.

I mean, it kind of started off with a big invitation to please roll your eyes: 43? 43 is not that old. You're tired of all "the arguing"? Stop arguing. But let's start at the end, because that's where the meat of this post is.

"I'm tired of seeing cool new projects and realizing I will never use them, because I don't want to be associated with key members of the communities surrounding them."

This is stupid. He's tired of acting like a petulant child, he says.

"I'm tired of those unable or unwilling to see outside their blinkered little world, and to think that others might think differently, and to think that their feelings might matter."

So he writes a blog post and put a reddit vote-me-up on the side.

"I'm tired of having to delete comments on Perlbuzz because the commenters can't manage to make a point without slinging insults at those with whom they disagree."

You moderate a community. It's not a status position, it's a job. If it's too much work, you can quit. Nobody will hate you for it. People quit staff positions in the big communities I'm a part of all the time; they usually stay in the community and they're just tired of taking care of it. It's fair, and it doesn't require a rant.

Obviously he's not happy with the state of moderation on perlbuzz, but that's something best taken up with the rest of the staff "hey $name, we should crack down on insults more" not the community at large. When moderators do this, it ends up making the whole community look bad. That shouldn't surprise you, because "making the community look bad" is clearly the intent of his little rant here. He's mud-slinging.

"That means less contribution, technical and otherwise, from me, and from the others who have shared the same concerns with me regarding their own contributions."

What's funny is this is probably the kind of status game he's complaining about up above. The people who are the most profane and arrogant in a community are none-too-rarely the people who estimate highly the value of their contributions (be they commensurately brilliant a la Gregory House or otherwise).

I'm sure -- I don't know the guy, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt -- I'm sure Andy Lester has made some pretty valuable contributions to the Perl community in the past. So, yes, "Perl loses because of it." This little ending touch is apparently Mr. Lester's way of totally disclaiming involvement in the situation; he's absolutely refusing to take responsibility for leaving. And Perl loses because of it.

Now on to the totally unrelated personal quest that nobody cares about he tries to make it applicable to the situation.

>I'm tired of hearing that profanity in written communication doesn't matter because hey, it's just words, man.

This is a curveball. How do you think this little unrelated tidbit made it in to the post? I mean, what does it have to do with anything?

As far as I can tell, it's clearly a reference to some other argument. It's an argument he also probably lost, because nobody keeps complaining and carrying on about the arguments they won. It's lame to bring it up while complaining about the general attitude of the Perl community towards each other.

<tangent>

It's also an argument where, if you ask me, he's totally wrong. Profanity - fuck, shit, cunt, piss, asshole, cocksucker - the complaint is leveled against those who say these are "just words", and perhaps "just words" isn't a very good description. Profanity is more like noise. Its effect when added to a sentence is to make the rest of the sentence louder. It has no intrinsic kindness or meanness to it. Some of the best parts of life are "fucking awesome"; the worst are "fucking terrible" or even "fucking shitty".

So it's a part of the English language, and it gets plenty of use in text because there aren't many ways to make text "loud". It's a natural human instinct to talk louder when you're angry or excited, and complain as much as you will that instinct really isn't going anywhere fast. Even those who abstain from "fuck" and "shit" find other ways to amplify their statements, be it through an excessive use of formatting (bold formatting is both louder and more visually offensive than italic formatting), plenty of symbolic annotation (by surrounding words with -dashes-, \asterisks\, /slashes/, or _underscores_), or abuse of grammatical conventions (these are too numerous to list, but include writing every word on it's own line, Capitalizing Every Word In The Sentence, putting. a. period. after. everything., or the dreaded "allcaps").

To me, it's pointless and silly and even elitist in some cases to argue over how precisely this amplification of textual communication is done. To draw a distinction between the guy who peppers his sentence with "cunt" and the guy who murders my linefeed with his Enter key is disingenuous, and to exile those who don't use whatever a community's "preferred" amplification style is insular and xenophobic. Profanity ranks quite low on the scale of offenses here, because it is perhaps the easiest to ignore and I'd rather see it than most of the alternatives.

</tangent>

A bit of background: I'm not a part of the Perl community; I have scant knowledge of Perl but as far as I know it's a fine language used and maintained by plenty of talented individuals and I've heard Moose is really cool though I can't make head or tail of it.

I do, however, know pathetic when I see it.

EDIT: I hope this isn't too personal. The main point is not "I hate Andy Lester" -- just please don't ever imitate what he's doing here.

Why? Because I don't like iPads?

Many people don't contribute to open source projects because rudeness discourages them from contributing.

I'd rather have more people contribute (and feel good for doing so).