"the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic."<p>There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less.<p>Seen it time and time again. I don't have answer to the situation in general.<p>"Code of Conduct" of course only exists when people have an interest in working together - which GNUesque projects seem to be more focused on.<p>Relatedly I observe opposite behaviour the plan9 related community generally - where everyone basically maintains their own patch trees. If you don't want to deal with other people or your changes aren't getting upstreamed for some political reason - it's not a big deal. You can just mail your patches to some friends and they'll use it.<p>In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking.<p>At the same time, these 'hackers' and major contributors should stick to their own medicine. If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. There's no reason to say something offensive, if your goal is to get a better quality code out there. If you think someone is a @$<i>#%(@</i>% or a piece of @$#%#@ or whatever cartoonishly evil phrase you want to use, who cares? just focus on the code.
Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. I think it worked pretty well because it refocused people on the code. It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it.<p>I could be wrong, but it seems now people feel obligated to make a public stance on social media or email lists. Some of it is genuine outrage, some of it is virtue signaling, etc... but the effect is that the perpetrator is backed into a corner in embarrassment at public shaming. It's difficult to come back from that.<p>I would dread being a young person now and live in terror of saying something stupid about trans issues or do some cultural appropriation I was unconscious of and be "called out" in a public manner.
This article seems to be highly misinformed.<p>The Perl Foundation is not The Perl Community. Sebastian Riedel and Curtis Poe are still very much involved in the community and development of Perl. Elizabeth Mattijsen and Samantha McVey have not been involved in the Perl community for quite some time. Mattijsen is heavily involved in the Raku development and community, and likewise remains so after this resignation from TPF.<p>Sawyer X resigned from the Perl Steering Council, not TPF, and as such is the only one here that actually was related to the development of Perl. Regardless, Perl development continues apace under the newly redesigned governance described at <a href="https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov" rel="nofollow">https://perldoc.perl.org/perlgov</a>, which has nothing to do with TPF.
The Perl community has always had a core group of arrogant jerks bickering with each other and blasting users they considered beneath their status.<p>When MacOS X was first released I asked a question about that on the MacPerl list and was told to "fuck off" because my question was "off topic".<p>I ended up requesting a new mailing list for MacOS X be created and it was. For the first year or two it grew very fast and it was a pleasure to be a part of it, but then some of the Perl "elite" started joining it. Randal Schwartz was among those who did and he was a complete jerk. He started trashing members on that list who'd been there helping others, including me. There were even developers who worked for Apple there, and Randal trashed them too.<p>I finally told Randal to "fuck off" and to my surprise there were a lot of members who stood up with me, and off Randal did fuck. It wasn't too long afterwards Randal screwed himself but good with his own arrogance.<p>It was around 2006 that I started using prototype.js to handle a lot of the things I was doing with Perl and not long after I unsubscribed from all the Perl mailing list I'd been on.<p>Nowadays all those Perl mailing lists are pretty much silent and I'm pretty sure the MacOS X perl list is dead.<p>I still admire Larry Wall though. He stayed far above that bullshit and remained friendly and humble when Perl was at it's pinnacle back around 2000-2005 and .cgi scripts were pretty much the backbone of web work.
> After spending a day wading through the stated reasons and back stories of these high-profile resignations, it's difficult to come to any single, clear conclusion—although "burn this entire pile of serpents down, with the most primal of magics" is frankly tempting.<p>Excellent article. Why does there have to be a <i>singular</i> "Perl community" and Foundation for it? Usually we get schisms and "Thrice Reformed" vs "New Revelation" groups sprout over differences of opinion that rise to intolerable levels.<p>Very similar to the "why shouldn't a project be forked" question; i get the feeling that forks are frowned on more severely now than in the past; but I can't see why. Recall Xemacs and ecgs, among others? Forks <i>work</i> or they die without bothering anyone.
> In a recent interview with The Register, McVey said, "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling toxicity in the Perl community."<p>This was not stated by McVey, but by me:<p>> "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling the toxicity in the Perl community," Mattijsen told The Register, "I'm doing my best to make sure that the Raku community will <i>not</i> allow individuals to create a toxic atmosphere without being challenged for what is now decades."
>> Ultimately, the presence of toxic elements—whether racist, sexist, or just plain aggressively bullying—in a community of any real size is perhaps inevitable.<p>More to the point, the fact that basically every online community eventually develops these behaviours makes it look like everyone on the internet is an asshole.
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.
Two equally revealing red flags indicating a potentially "toxic" project:<p>1. Absence of an informal Code of Conduct<p>2. Presence of a formal Code of Conduct.
I'm mostly amazed that enough people still use Perl that they have a board and a community action committee and a "pumpking" whatever that is.<p>Also, I feel like characterising this as a CoC enforcement issue is a bit misleading - after reading the article this isn't really about the same thing as the backlash to CoCs (like not using preferred pronouns or whatever). This is just straight up abuse and racism. You don't need a CoC for that.