Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

According to the Urban dictionary, "cruft" (actually "crufty") is defined as:

    Generic derogatory term for something that is hacked together, badly designed, shabby or otherwise substandard. Often used in the description of software user interfaces.

To my ears, cruft, although legitimately computer-sciency is definitely derogatory and if I was in the Perl Core team I'd feel very incensed by its deliberate use to define anything having to do with the work I'm trying to do.

I'm sorry these things come down to personal harassment and generally aggressive behavior. I'm not trying to justify the unjustifiable, but sometimes people, specially the team leader here, needs to be a little more considerate with word choice when talking about people's work. English is not my first language and many times I've realized while speaking that a certain word, just because it's used a lot, is not adequate in certain situations as it can be demeaning of others, sarcastic and disdainful in itself.

This is really close to victim blaming. Do you really think things would have been any different if the author had avoided the word "cruft" but put forth the same meaning? I don't think it would have.

Sawyer X's paradox is that he's the soldier-diplomat that walked into the Perl 5 to Perl 7 warzone to try to fight (t)his battle (Perl 7, cruftness) and at the same time defuse the conflict. He even admits to being "offensive to some" in his OP. He's a bold person, fierce in his beliefs and in his choice of words, not a victim. And so his boldness and passion has taken him to being scolded in every possible way, from personal to technical, toxic to civilized, and sometimes he fought hard, even on a personal level and finally gave up.

Here's a few comments from a thread allegedly savaged from Twitter [1]:

> So no choosing which Perl runs for /usr/bin/perl7 and which Perl /usr/bin/perl or and which is /usr/bin/perl like with some other languages? Will I be able to use 7's features without 'use v7' if I do name the executable 'perl7'? Does using 'use v7'm mean keeping all the cruft?

> Depends on what you mean by cruft

> The people actually doing work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic and if they do we can rip out stuff after a deprecation period like normal, so unless/until somebody who knows the core code objects I consider that an imaginary problem.

> yeah, i tried to point this out below as well think it should be mentioned that the email linked is from nicholas clark, so there's 3 core maintainers who hold that the important of cruft in perl code is in doubt

As one can see, the word "cruft" had actually become central to the discussion, even used with apostrophes - a sign that it hit a nerve somewhere? Maybe a better choice of words and overall tact would have been better in managing egos left and right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779586

There is also a bit of context in the referenced mailing list posts, which are in response to a rationale given for Sawyer's initial Perl 7 plan - perhaps to us, repeating the argument previously used as justification for breaking code was a sore spot as well.

> > Depends on what you mean by cruft

As the one who asked that:

That wasn't even aimed at sawyer for one.

For the other it was an honest question because Perl has a LOT of cruft both in the code, in the tooling, in the docs, in the design and the syntax. As such it was important to ask which cruft the person was referring to before being able to answer.

The existence of cruft is not in any possible way in question for anyone involved. The only questions are: Which cruft are you talking about? Why do you think it's a problem? Do the people who touch said cruft daily agree it's a problem for <implementation of x> at the current point in time?

Now note also how the above compares to sawyer's central claim in his email:

> I had dared to say that people in Core recognize there is cruft in the language

And consider that such disconnects marked his communications for almost a year now.

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