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in reply to What Made the Perl Community Mean Spirited?

I’ve been doing little but Perl for more than 15 years now and I’m on a few mailing lists and read blogs and such and I also have no idea what you’re talking about. If anything, there is less aggression and more tolerance to beginners and more community minded things like Neil Bower’s CPAN Pull Request Challenge than I remember from 10 years ago. There are a couple of prominent hackers who use coarse language while helping as many others as they can by taking time out of busy lives for free. They get criticized sometimes. I think that’s tripe. If hearing the f-word and being told I should have figured out something myself is the “price” for technical help and free code that would otherwise cost $1,000–$10,000, I’m grateful. I’m an adult and I recognize the deed far outweighs the word. A lot of grown-ups are not adult and expect others to modify their behavior to suit their subjective, localized, sometimes bigoted preferences. That’s spoilt tripe. FOSS starts with Free for more reasons than money.

I’m here helping with what I’m good at all the time; and as much as I like it in other realms I don’t work blue here. Being told that I’m part of a community that is “so mean spirited” is a bit insulting. ಠ_ಠ