Re: Is the 'Perl Community' naive and/or stupid?

in reply to Is the 'Perl Community' naive and/or stupid?

Who stands to benefit? News agencies and advertisers. News gets reported, and any kind of suggestion of scandal or fear ("Perl is insecure, run!!!") gets readers. More readers bring higher advertising dollars.

We see the fallout on PM because the press created a situation where this story got a high public profile. It's in the forefront of many people's minds, who have many different agendas. At least some segment of those people will pimp themselves on a forum dedicated to discussing Perl.

I wouldn't read much more into it than human nature suggets. Who was it that said 'never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance' (or something like that)?

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Comment on Re: Is the 'Perl Community' naive and/or stupid?

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Re^2: Is the 'Perl Community' naive and/or stupid? by Tanktalus (Canon) on Dec 08, 2005 at 15:56 UTC
You asked ... so I looked for it. Best I could find was Hanlon's Razor saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Ignorance and stupidity aren't quite the same thing, but are probably close enough for this purpose. Most likely you're right. When assigning blame, one should look for intent. What is the intent of these journalists? Most likely, their intent is to hit a deadline to sell advertising. Nothing malicious about that, although they may do so recklessly without regard for how much of the truth they explore in their stories. The idea that they write these stories trying to do damage to the Perl community is plausible, but highly unlikely. As for the "high public profile" - I imagine there will be very little fallout from this. Even Microsoft gets very little fallout from all their emergency patches they were sending out as the world still is primarily Windows, IE, and Word, and those were much more pervasive, exploited, and visible problems than this one. Six months from now, no more than a couple dozen people will even remember it - probably not even the journalists that wrote about it. That's not to say that P5P isn't doing a fabulous job in solving the underlying problem for 5.8.8, nor to say that they shouldn't bother. Security threats are serious, and should be taken as such. Just that most people don't seem to treat them that way, and it'll just be a fog in their memory in the not-too-distant future.	[reply]

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Re^2: Is the 'Perl Community' naive and/or stupid?
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Dec 08, 2005 at 15:56 UTC

You asked ... so I looked for it. Best I could find was Hanlon's Razor saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Ignorance and stupidity aren't quite the same thing, but are probably close enough for this purpose.

Most likely you're right. When assigning blame, one should look for intent. What is the intent of these journalists? Most likely, their intent is to hit a deadline to sell advertising. Nothing malicious about that, although they may do so recklessly without regard for how much of the truth they explore in their stories. The idea that they write these stories trying to do damage to the Perl community is plausible, but highly unlikely.

As for the "high public profile" - I imagine there will be very little fallout from this. Even Microsoft gets very little fallout from all their emergency patches they were sending out as the world still is primarily Windows, IE, and Word, and those were much more pervasive, exploited, and visible problems than this one. Six months from now, no more than a couple dozen people will even remember it - probably not even the journalists that wrote about it.

That's not to say that P5P isn't doing a fabulous job in solving the underlying problem for 5.8.8, nor to say that they shouldn't bother. Security threats are serious, and should be taken as such. Just that most people don't seem to treat them that way, and it'll just be a fog in their memory in the not-too-distant future.

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