The Perl Foundation faces more departures | Hacker News Reader

The Perl Foundation faces more departures

theregister.com

44 pointskeutoi13 comments

Oh well. This one.

Just some context: Samantha McVey was/is involved with the guy who kept pushing repositories with names like perl6-n_g_er (fully spelled out, of course) and commit messages like "Get a job, n_g_er". Just look at this juicy thread:

https://twitter.com/kraih/status/1408525949218570240

There was also a Slack log which corroborated what Sebastian had written about, and I don't know why I spent time to read it, but I have read it, and at the end I don't know why CAT even exists, what exact function it fulfills except for apparently being a SI unit of hypocrisy, and what a joke the whole thing (TPF and CAT both) is.

What community is welcoming and allows someone like that to be active in 2021? That's shocking and disgusting.

> was/is involved

was.

Fighting over who to cancel is an ugly thing, and we need not do it. What is gained? Civility? The grim possibility of being ostracized is itself the object of conflict. Any sufficiently motivated argument devolves to the question of who deserves to be canceled.

Remove this hazard entirely. Make it easier to step away from an ugly thread.

This is a voluntary meritocracy, not a revolutionary committee for the eradication of hidden societal power structures. As such, the question of who to lynch today has no place in it.

This is no longer a meritocracy, people around here will accuse you of privilege for even suggesting a meritocracy could exist.

China and Russia are laughing all the way to the bank while the baizuo bring down the rest of the world.

It's not a meritocracy if you actively push certain types of people away. Merit implies selection based on ability, if you're disqualifying swathes of people with toxicity towards them, it's not a real meritocracy at all. It's a shitty cult.

Wanting to create a less toxic environment that welcomes people and getting rid of people that are hostile to that would be taking steps towards a true meritocracy.

Now, for the next step in achieving meritocracy, one must mention the inherent toxicity of "whiteness."

https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteness+toxic

The 'merit' you get from keeping around someone like this has to be weighted against the 'merit' you lose from their behavior driving other people away.

For example, where's the merit in this: https://web.archive.org/web/20210625135404/https://git.tyil.... ?

Whatever happens to Perl and Larry Wall they will always have a place in my heart. In many ways Larry was the ultimate hacker's hacker and I think programming culture was a little more colourful back in the 90s and early 2000s when Perl was popular. There's never been anything quite like Perl Monks.

I did not follow the rise of the Perl Foundation, was it "we need to pay these people for the work they do for the community" or was it "We need a way to take this away from Larry Wall?"

It was originally for helping to organize Perl events. It acted as an entity that could enter into contracts for insurance and rental purposes.

It was extended to have grants among other things.

Larry Wall has historically only really been influential on the design of the language. So it was not taken away, he just has rarely done anything outside of that.

I wonder if this kind of stuff is more likely to occur in technical communities that are becoming irrelevant but at one point had a lot of exposure.

Oh, MST...

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