> On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 05:19:26PM -0700, Daniel S. Wilkerson wrote:
> > I would say Simon was the one "ignoring an issue and attacking
> a person", not
> > Vijay.
>
> You are wrong. Go back through the archives. Vijay has posted four
> messages: two of which are critical of Perl, two of which are pretty
> heated personal attacks on me. None of those four does anything useful
> for Perl 6.
>
> If he *hasn't* ignored the issue - which is Perl 6 - please show me a
> URL for a message.
Then I'd point out all of them, Simon.
Perl 6 reform is larger than language syntax and the innards of an
interpreter. Perl 6 reform has been claimed to be a social one as well. I
would therefore suggest that any email posted by any person, the goal of
which email was to call to order a foul temper or misbehaving community
member or to correct the formation of cliques among us, such an email would
be precisely on topic for the reformation of this language.
I consider this social reform of at least equal importance to the Perl
community as any new syntactic differences and changes in underlying parser
engines. I personally consider social reform to be far more important than
the latter, but I do not expect everyone to share that particular opinion.
Let us please not fall into the P5P trap of considering as valid
contributions only segments of this or that code applied to the Perl core on
a particular operating system. That is an old argument that cannot be won.
All people contribute if they add value to the Perl language or culture, be
it in documentation, related software, work on any operating system, or
social rehabilitation. No subculture or group should consider itself of more
importance or value to the language or community than another. No subculture
or group should consider itself above reproof, whether from within that
subculture, or from without.
Tom Christiansen once argued contrawise, as did Sarathy to a large extent.
It finally came out that Tom considered value only what directly improved
perl within the perl core on his own system, meaning his own contributions.
Sarathy argued that only contributors of code were helpful to the perl
community, leaving out testers, documentors, module writers, and basically
everyone else. Neither person was right, and neither position is remotely
arguable in a "movement" whose (at least) /partner/ emphasis is on the
reformation of the community and revocation of attitudes like these two
expressed.
If Vijay chooses to concentrate his efforts within the social-reform arena,
I do not consider his contrubutions any less valid or any less efficacious
than your own.
p
