I tried to listen to the speech linked from your later post. I swear I did. I gave up after about ten minutes of random ramblings so I do not know what were the comments and as you can't have a fulltext search through someone's speech I probably will not ever know. One of the reasons Larry might find PerlMonks and the Perl community in general kind of mean spirited is the failed project of rewriting Perl and the (mine included) not so favourable responses to the endless progress and "progress" reports. I understand that it hurts.

Now I'm rather thick skinned and goal oriented so I can't assess the mean spiritedness of the community properly, but I do not find the community mean spirited in general.