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in reply to deconstructing String::Iota - not worth one iota

Update: I cleaned up my language. I was pretty angry when I first wrote this

CPAN's philosophy has always been to release early and release often. We want people to upload instead of hiding code in some silo until they think jerks like you will approve and bless it. We want people to put up their work as early as possible so other people can help them with it. Even with my years of experience, I still make some of those mistakes (like the stupid ._ files that show up every time Apple changes the special environment variable for their own tar).

So what if the module sucks now? People can see it and help the original author improve it. That's the point of open source. If the Perl community had your attitude when I started, I probably wouldn't be involved with Perl at all.

This is becoming more and more of a problem with the Perl community. Perl Best Practices gave jerks a new way to attack newbies for doing newbie things. I'm genuinely sad when I see a rabid gang of PBP police go after someone who's obviously new. In the big scheme of things, newbies need gentle introductions and guidance when they start, not nitpicking and pedantic attacks about Pod, whitespace, and so on. This sort of crap drives away any of the new blood that Perl could use. It's even driving away some experienced people as the new braindead megaphones crowd out the sensible developers.

If you really wanted to help, and I don't think you do, you'd pick a couple of important things to help the author with, or even make the patches to fix some of these trivial things. Instead, you simply want to gloat with all your Perlmonks buddies about how you're better than some newbie, all the while hiding beyond Anonymous.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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  • Comment on Re: deconstructing String::Iota - not worth one iota

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Re^2: deconstructing String::Iota - not worth one iota
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jun 10, 2009 at 18:34 UTC

    Update: I cleaned up mine to match.

    I totally agree with the sentiment. I think you overlook the social-newbie angle. Some devs are just socially clumsy, not really jerks. They just don't know how to express the stuff and are in the middle tier of their dev-development. Beginners know they know nothing. Gurus are aware of how much there is to know and most of them replace attitude with confidence. It's that middle ground that sometimes substitutes arrogance for our beloved hubris. Many can be guided out of it with good examples from well-known and highly respected devs. Like say... you. Peer pressure only works on those who want to remain peers. :)

    That said, ++, and I confess to enjoying it when MST unloads some F-bombs on the DBIC list now and then.

Re^2: deconstructing String::Iota - not worth one iota
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 10, 2009 at 20:34 UTC
    Update: I cleaned up my language. I was pretty angry when I first wrote this

    brian d foy =~ s/d/"devil's tongue"/; :D