I like his emphasis on kindness. Imagine a forum where you could rate a post on a separate dimension of kindness/ meanness (alongside rating on the usual vague dimension of "like/ dislike")... with restriction of privileges for people who are persistently mean. :)
There's nothing more pathetic and annoying than and "I'm leaving" blog post. They always take the same format: a bunch of complaints leveled against nameless individuals (but they know who they are, that sort of thing) and lip service to the author's pet peeve that nobody else cares about.
I mean, it kind of started off with a big invitation to please roll your eyes: 43? 43 is not that old. You're tired of all "the arguing"? Stop arguing. But let's start at the end, because that's where the meat of this post is.
"I'm tired of seeing cool new projects and realizing I will never use them, because I don't want to be associated with key members of the communities surrounding them."
This is stupid. He's tired of acting like a petulant child, he says.
"I'm tired of those unable or unwilling to see outside their blinkered little world, and to think that others might think differently, and to think that their feelings might matter."
So he writes a blog post and put a reddit vote-me-up on the side.
"I'm tired of having to delete comments on Perlbuzz because the commenters can't manage to make a point without slinging insults at those with whom they disagree."
You moderate a community. It's not a status position, it's a job. If it's too much work, you can quit. Nobody will hate you for it. People quit staff positions in the big communities I'm a part of all the time; they usually stay in the community and they're just tired of taking care of it. It's fair, and it doesn't require a rant.
Obviously he's not happy with the state of moderation on perlbuzz, but that's something best taken up with the rest of the staff "hey $name, we should crack down on insults more" not the community at large. When moderators do this, it ends up making the whole community look bad. That shouldn't surprise you, because "making the community look bad" is clearly the intent of his little rant here. He's mud-slinging.
"That means less contribution, technical and otherwise, from me, and from the others who have shared the same concerns with me regarding their own contributions."
What's funny is this is probably the kind of status game he's complaining about up above. The people who are the most profane and arrogant in a community are none-too-rarely the people who estimate highly the value of their contributions (be they commensurately brilliant a la Gregory House or otherwise).
I'm sure -- I don't know the guy, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt -- I'm sure Andy Lester has made some pretty valuable contributions to the Perl community in the past. So, yes, "Perl loses because of it." This little ending touch is apparently Mr. Lester's way of totally disclaiming involvement in the situation; he's absolutely refusing to take responsibility for leaving. And Perl loses because of it.
Now on to the totally unrelated personal quest that nobody cares about he tries to make it applicable to the situation.
>I'm tired of hearing that profanity in written communication doesn't matter because hey, it's just words, man.
This is a curveball. How do you think this little unrelated tidbit made it in to the post? I mean, what does it have to do with anything?
As far as I can tell, it's clearly a reference to some other argument. It's an argument he also probably lost, because nobody keeps complaining and carrying on about the arguments they won. It's lame to bring it up while complaining about the general attitude of the Perl community towards each other.
<tangent>
It's also an argument where, if you ask me, he's totally wrong. Profanity - fuck, shit, cunt, piss, asshole, cocksucker - the complaint is leveled against those who say these are "just words", and perhaps "just words" isn't a very good description. Profanity is more like noise. Its effect when added to a sentence is to make the rest of the sentence louder. It has no intrinsic kindness or meanness to it. Some of the best parts of life are "fucking awesome"; the worst are "fucking terrible" or even "fucking shitty".
So it's a part of the English language, and it gets plenty of use in text because there aren't many ways to make text "loud". It's a natural human instinct to talk louder when you're angry or excited, and complain as much as you will that instinct really isn't going anywhere fast. Even those who abstain from "fuck" and "shit" find other ways to amplify their statements, be it through an excessive use of formatting (bold formatting is both louder and more visually offensive than italic formatting), plenty of symbolic annotation (by surrounding words with -dashes-, \asterisks\, /slashes/, or _underscores_), or abuse of grammatical conventions (these are too numerous to list, but include writing every word on it's own line, Capitalizing Every Word In The Sentence, putting. a. period. after. everything., or the dreaded "allcaps").
To me, it's pointless and silly and even elitist in some cases to argue over how precisely this amplification of textual communication is done. To draw a distinction between the guy who peppers his sentence with "cunt" and the guy who murders my linefeed with his Enter key is disingenuous, and to exile those who don't use whatever a community's "preferred" amplification style is insular and xenophobic. Profanity ranks quite low on the scale of offenses here, because it is perhaps the easiest to ignore and I'd rather see it than most of the alternatives.
</tangent>
A bit of background: I'm not a part of the Perl community; I have scant knowledge of Perl but as far as I know it's a fine language used and maintained by plenty of talented individuals and I've heard Moose is really cool though I can't make head or tail of it.
I do, however, know pathetic when I see it.
EDIT: I hope this isn't too personal. The main point is not "I hate Andy Lester" -- just please don't ever imitate what he's doing here.
E.g. If the management at a company is doing something that the employees don't like, "voting with your feet" without telling management why you are leaving guarantees that nothing will change. Other than maybe adding a 'Casual Tuesday' (or some other HR BS) in an attempt to raise morale.
Who am I to say things to this guy's face? I don't know him. I haven't been aware of his existence, beyond maybe having used a project or two that he's worked on, until today. He presumably doesn't want to hear from me.
I'm saying that his behavior is bad for the community, both Perl's and ours. I'm saying it to "the HN community", because I have nobody else to say it to.
We've seen this before. It was titled "Rails is a ghetto" and whatever change it inspired didn't cover the drama it caused. Zed himself said he was sorry to have written it.
I haven't read "Rails is a ghetto," but I do know that Zed Shaw's writing style is a lot more abrasive than this article. The basic premise here seems to be, "Why can't people just be civil to each other?" On the other hand, most of Zed Shaw's writing is of the form, "I'm right, and these people are wrong. They are so wrong that it physically pains me, and I should probably sue them for that." The only link that they would seem to have is that they are both, "I'm leaving X community, and here is why" blog posts.
I know neither you nor Andy in person. But from reading Andy online, I get the impression that he is bright, talented, and kind. From reading you, I get the impression of someone bright, talented, and immature. I value your technical contributions here, but at times fear your overall impact on the site.
Banning you from a project is not hypocritical on his part -- it's exactly what he's talking about. He feels, rightly or wrongly, that it's better to remove the source of incivility than to put up with it. You've got a lot of obvious talent and knowledge, but yes, Andy might be a good role model for civil interactions.
No, I don't care for iPads either. My fear is that HN is a wonderful but fragile community. You offer a mix of knowledge and irreverence (I'm pretty sure I vote you up here more than I vote you down), but those who see you winning attention for snide but insightful comments are more likely to copy the snideness than the insight. I like that civil public discussion is still possible here, and want to keep it that way.
"... I'm tired of people who confuse being verbally abusive with "not getting along." ... I'm tired of people who think that verbal abuse of another human is ever acceptable. ..."
It was Andy Lester who took up the slack and organised programmers for the orphaned Perl code written by the late Iain "Spoon" Truskett, fellow Aussie & Perl programmer ~ http://search.cpan.org/~spoon/ who passed away in 2004. For any negative stories you hear there are always going to be some positive ones. Further reading here ~ http://use.perl.org/~goon/journal/16893
I'm sure there's some deep context to that - could you share/link? Claiming that kind of experience juxtaposed with an article like this screams of the importance of us drawing our own conclusions rather than taking either of your words for it.
I forget. I was giving him patches for HTML::Tidy, then some whining occurred on IRC, then he "banned" me. Wish I still had the logs, but it was like 4 years ago.
The context was my asking "why didn't The Perl Foundation get any Google SoC projects?" I then implied that they don't do a whole lot, because I checked their IRS filings and noticed that they had several hundred thousand dollars sitting in a checking account. Why not put it in a savings account?
We then get to being banned from contributing to HTML::Tidy:
22:48 <@jrockway> fine, i will happily mentor someone in an area i am familar
with
22:48 <@jrockway> i have no problem with that at all
22:48 <@jrockway> next year.
22:48 <@Andy> That doesn't do much good now.
22:48 <@jrockway> what can i do this year?
22:48 <@Andy> Well, for one you can quit denigrating TPF about how useless it
is.
22:49 <@jrockway> no, i can't do that
22:49 <@jrockway> what's something real i can do
22:49 <@Andy> I'm sorry to hear that you can't do that.
22:49 <@Andy> because I think that's pretty much a requirement to help out.
22:49 <@jrockway> no, it's not
22:49 <@Andy> Nobody wants help from someone who's complaining about things.
22:49 <@jrockway> you should accept help even if people don't like you (not you
personally, i mean the TPF)
22:49 <@jrockway> fine
22:49 <@jrockway> i will continue to whine then
22:50 <@jrockway> that's good for everyone
22:50 <@Andy> I have no doubt about that.
22:50 * jrockway goes to work on perl projects
22:50 <@elliot> :/
22:50 <@Andy> Not HTML::Tidy, though.
22:50 <@jrockway> "THATS MINE DON'T TOUCH IT"
22:50 <@jrockway> so constructive
22:51 <@Andy> No, I just don't need help from someone who bashes and denigrates.
22:51 <@jrockway> that's childish, but whatever
22:53 <@Andy> Not sure how choosing to decide who to work with is childish.
22:53 <@jrockway> meritocracy
22:54 <@jrockway> i accept patches / comments from anyone
22:54 <@jrockway> if the code is good, i could care less who gives it to me
22:54 <@Andy> Open source is about more than code.
22:54 <@jrockway> to you
22:55 <@hobbs> actually its motto is "shut up and show us the code"
22:55 <@jrockway> to me it is about code and solving problems
22:55 <@jrockway> hobbs++
22:55 <@Andy> Not all problems are solved through code.
22:56 <@jrockway> to be honest i haven't run into anyone that i have personal
problems with
22:56 <@jrockway> and mst is often not very nice to me
22:56 <@chargrill> well, mst is often a jerk to a lot of people.
22:56 <@jrockway> i get over it, he's a good programmer
22:56 <@jrockway> he says the same about me
22:56 <@Andy> jrockway: There are plenty of people you have personal problems
with.
22:56 <@jrockway> i don't like that implication
22:56 <@Andy> OK.
22:57 <@jrockway> i have no problems with you, i have a problem with TPF
22:57 <@jrockway> i am not the only one
22:57 <@Andy> I wasn't talking about me.
22:58 <@jrockway> do we really need to focus on "who likes who"
22:59 <@jrockway> i mean, there's myspace for that
22:59 <@Andy> It's a key part of open source.
22:59 <@Andy> And I'd ask you to consider that.
23:01 <@jrockway> so what's the resolution to this?
23:01 <@jrockway> i still dislike TPF, and you have one fewer developer on
HTML::Tidy?
23:01 <@jrockway> that is always good
23:01 <@jrockway> big win for everyone
Incidentally, a few people created a new TPF-like entity. So I must have not been the only person in the world that didn't think they were amazingly effective or transparent.
You were the one who said he liked the new feature that comment scores are hidden because it means that your snarky comments get more upvotes. This is exactly the attitude the article complains about, so that you got banned from his projects might not actually point to a problem on his side.
Dude... look at it this way. Imagine that post was the first thing someone read upon arriving at HN. It represents the community. Do you think they'd want to stay and participate?
If you're tired, take a nap. When you wake back up, the world won't seem such a horrid place, and you'll be able to get back to making cool software again instead of lamenting.
He's basically experiencing burn-out with respect to the Perl community. I'm confident that if "taking more naps" was a cure-all for burn-out, then burn-out wouldn't be such an issue.
Aside: I don't think that he was being literal in his use of the word 'tired.' I don't know if it was intentional or not, but you're response comes off a bit like this:
person 1: I'm sick and tired of dealing with these
issues!
person 2: If you're sick, then you should see a doctor!
Maybe I can explain this comment without getting downvoted again.
Many people contribute to open source projects for years without complaining about rudeness. Successful leaders like DHH and Linus even come across as rude themselves. I imagine that people that aren't bothered by rudeness have an easier time collaborating than those who are.
My perception is that people downvoted you because your comment was a mean spirited shot which contributed absolutely nothing to the discussion, not because they disagreed with you.
How was I whining? I just made an observation about the amount of downvotes, I thought the change in the voting system was interesting. Not whining but it looks like I've burned about 40 points here.
http://perlbuzz.com/2010/11/think-for-perls-sake.html