Glowing Colons with Barium

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Last week was YAPC::NA and I am sorry I missed Gnat's Lightning Talk entitled What the Perl Community Needs is a Good Enema. I've heard Gnat give this sort of talk before as repetition is often an effective learning tool, but this time he's getting closer to the truth. Mark Twain, a fellow Missourian and cynic, once said, "Familiarity breeds contempt...and children."

Perl has a seriously dysfunctional family at some levels; there are sacred cows; there are needless politics; people suffer sociopaths for their 'code' and other mystifying reasons. And, like any family with problems who don't want to be confrontational, they tend to focus on the abstract and far more benign symptoms of dysfunction instead which usually does little to fix the problems, but does succeed in shifting the uncomfortable point of focus elsewhere. CPAN is often a very popular target of this phenomenon since it's easy to do, generally vague and it carries little risk that anyone might actually force you to put your money where your mouth is. The problem is people, that's certain, but if there were any leadership in the community the problems would, if not disappear, would at least be far less destructive.

Let's return to July 2000, when TPC4 was in Monterey, CA and I was invited on short notice to attend what was billed as a meeting to attempt to draft something of a "Constitution" for the Perl community. I was intrigued since, at the time, the community was as bitter, ugly, and pissy as a crowd of open source nerds ever were. There were about 11 people in this meeting. After an hour or so of discussion about what could be done to effect some positive social change in the community, Jon Orwant showed up, tried to break the hotel stonewear mugs built to outlast puny humans and somehow the idea of Perl6 became the shining new light that would save Perl from stagnation and doom. I felt a bit betrayed since I had originally pitched up for something I felt was far more important and noone wanted to answer my question "Why?".

I told Jarkko and a few others on the way out of that meeting that they could count on P6 never coming to fruition until the deep and vast social problems in the community were addressed. It wasn't a popular comment, but I remained and still remain firm in my conviction. The P6 project, in spite of itself, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to P5P since it drew most of the problem people to the 'community rewrite' and left the folks who actually wrote code to get things done. However, I don't think that was really the point of the exercise and it has taken what was a fractured community and simply added another gaping fissure which seems to belch sulphurous gases at regular intervals.

Perl6 presaged what I have come to call "the age of the press release" in the timeline of perl. People not only are legends in their own minds and believe their own press releases, but many projects since have been more concerned with the press release than the actual project itself. It is a culture that has seriously lost sight of what brought us all together in the first place. A culture so incredibly pleased with itself that it forgets that volunteering for a job used to mean that you did the work first without talking it to death. The Perl Foundation is the only place I've EVER gotten bitched out for pressing the issue of sending thank-you notes to donors. ALWAYS thank your donors and volunteers, I don't care if you are some hopped up nerd king who claims Asperger ate your social cortex. I'll admit that I was a real PITA about it, but after 3 years and little improvement it wasn't entirely unwarranted. I think the person behind that particular clusterfuck is on both of our lists of what Nathan calls "Oldbies" and I call "sociopathic MFs". This is the part where I start waving my arms, cussing wildly and ranting about TPF but it, too, is just a victim of the symptoms of a far larger problem.

I was on the White Camel Awards committee Gnat mentions and, with a few other folks, subscribed to the list late but arrived just in time to see the tail end of a rant followed by 2 or 3 people sending "I quit!" messages. I wondered what in the hell was going on, got the lowdown from someone in a private email and thought how typical for perl people to make painful that which could be so easy and possibly even pleasant. I had been prepared to stump for and debate over candidates when I agreed to participate, but the enthusisam was gone after that. I have, for many years, argued that the recipients of the awards should be selected by the people in the community instead of an awards cabal since they are touted as awards for service in the community. The awards are important and they should reflect the opinion of more than 4 or so people in a small cabal of friends who bothered to vote. However, I'm not entirely certain that the community at large could be bothered to care or vote these days. HJ gets it even though he identifies the absence of the inner onion entourage as a symptom in spite of the fact that the YAPC::EU conferences rarely get the 'names' and are the conferences to be at for the active developers in the past few years. He has noted well the necrosis.

While I think Gnat needs to repeat his talk more often and in a more pointed fashion, it needs to focus on the one thing that many of us have pointed at for a long while; Perl needs some strong leadership. It needs leaders who are less concerned about playing politics and making nice to everyone while quietly bitching in the corner and leaders who are willing to defile the sacred cows and who won't be left twisting in the wind alone. Just inviting people to rewrite web pages and join committees sounds a lot like the Perl6 "community rewrite of Perl" call to glory which did little to solve any of the social problems which are the soul of the malaise. Nothing will change until those who enjoy all the benefits of being leaders without actually leading, lead.

When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's. -- Mark Twain

I have, rather unexpectedly been getting a lot of quiet support and praise for this piece, but the best quote of all was:

I think the Perl 6 announcement is where Perl jumped the shark.

I suppose that noone is really saying much publicly because, well, few really give a damn anymore, but it's like watching something die a slow, theatrical death and it makes me sad for the days when things were good. I don't know if those for whom I chose my words most carefully for have read this but I can hope that I'm not just preaching to the choir who could fill a large cathedral at this point.