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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

So... a completely non-programming issue is causing a bunch of non-programming members of the community and one programming member to leave. Bye, I guess.

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Did you read this part:

> In March of this year, Patrick Spek—a former member of the Perl 6 (Raku) steering council—committed to .config/git/config with a commit message saying "Get a job" followed by the n-word. Sebastian Riedel lodged a complaint with TPF board, which he says was railroaded by a board member—therefore, Riedel quit.

Is a commit message a programming issue? If that kind of conduct is accepted, I don't think I'd want to be associated either.

For him that word has a different meaning and interpretation than to you.

> committed to .config/git/config

In his personal dotfiles repo.

That's not how words work. The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people.

Like pronouns?

It would be nice if definitions were well-known and stable but there seems to be a significant number of people working against that ideal in favor of definitions that are malleable and curated (some might say policed) by various preferred groups.

IMHO, this is the source of quite a bit of division of late.

Different people have different interpretations of certain words depending on various factors (environment, culture, etc), and don't forget that words change meaning over time. He is simply coming from a culture where that word has evolved into being a generic insult. This is even more likely especially because it is a private repo, he would be less interested in writing in a way accessible to others compared to a public repo.

> The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people

I will disagree with this, and so will every diary-owner and note-taker. In addition, even if this was true there are various languages (like tut) which are intended to be used within a specific community, just because something is written it does not mean that it needs to be understood by everyone, although it is desirable in public projects. Not to mention that this statement assumes that he knew that they would interpret it in a way which he did not intent.

Anyway, he made a new commit earlier today without it: https://git.tyil.nl/dotfiles/commit/?id=891b7a7a31941dfe253c...

...which is why those intent on pushing their narrative into every nook and cranny of society start by redefining commonly used words like 'racism', 'oppression', 'equity', 'woman' etc.

Yes, words have meanings. Those meanings may shift, language evolves after all. This is not what happens currently though when words are forcibly redefined to fit a certain narrative. This is a language revolution by means of revolutionary language.

The so-called 'n-word' and the absolute ban on its use by 'whites' where the version ending with 'a' seems to be used in every other line of most rap lyrics is in this comparable to the Dutch word for a homosexual man ('flikker') which was banned from common use but taken up as a nom-de-guerre by homosexual men. This habit of seeding the field of language with linguistic landmines has done nothing to ease tensions, the opposite is true. This is a relatively recent development as can be seen by watching earlier commercials: bout a week ago I happened to play a video of the first two hours of MTV [1] in the corner of my screen when my ears and eyes were drawn to a commercial about 'The United Negro College Fund' [2] using its full name. The fund still exists but I'm hard-pressed seeing them use their full name in any advertising campaign now due to the stigma attached to the word 'negro', according to an entry in the talk page [3] they are in the process of changing their name because of this. This commercial was 40 years old.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJtiPRDIqtI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCF

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:UNCF#United_Fund

Sawyer is a loss cat herding/code wise, though I hope he'll be back when he decompresses some (there's a reason I've publicly stated I deserved to be smacked for upsetting him, that was DUMB on my part) - though after I apologised for accidentally upsetting him, we've got back to chatting about code related stuff, so I think there's a decent chance my hope isn't misplaced.

The other perl coder resignations are people resigning from the non-profit, not stepping away from the code.

Sam has actually been a pretty damn effective community cat herder (and I say this as somebody for whom she was the lead inquisatrix, but I have enough moderation experience myself to not take that part personally) and I hope once she decompresses she'll come back.

The only 'programming member of the community' we'll likely lose permanently is lizmat, and she'd already become a raku-only programming member of the community and deleted her entire set of perl5 cpan uploads without warning (breaking a number of users' installations) in a fit of pique because she's convinced the perl5 community is trying to persecute her, so between that and her active opposition to enforcement of basic standards of civility she won't realistically be missed.

> a bunch of non-programming members of the community and one programming member

That doesn't look accurate to me? The article has bullet points listing five people who left, all of whom are programmers.

While you're correct, what they "left" is actually a non-programming legal foundation (other than Sawyer X), and so the commenter is actually correct that this ultimately does not have the impact on the Perl community that the article suggests.

Those itemized (and the two people who also left TPF roles who have not been listed) only left their TPF committee positions, and not their programmer roles. Sebastian even did another Mojolicious release this weekend, and his presence on the libera#mojo channel has not changed.

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