Last night, I attended the emergency social meeting of London.pm. I don't often go to Perl Monger events, since they emphasise quite what's wrong with the Perl community - egotism, pedantry and ingratitude, writ large.
But last night was special. The emergency was my leaving Perl development, and the meeting was apparently subtitled "Why Perl is f*cked".
It's a pretty daunting task to go talk about such a subject to a Perl Mongers group. But it's a lot easier if they do the talking and you just agree. Some of the things we agreed on I don't want to go into in public - or even in private, sorry. Some points were quite interesting. Paul Makepeace talked about the lack of a J2EE-style application framework for common web application tasks. Amazing, given that we've got nearly a gig of CPAN, that we don't have a nice easy way to do stuff like registering a user for a web site and storing their email address. Why? Because there's too many ways to do it, so everyone does it their own way. Oh, and a lot more stuff, besides. I don't need to explain it. You know, deep down, don't you?
40 members of London.pm have formed London.class.
Boy - I wish I did know. You've said you aren't going to explain it more here but you've really got me wishing I was in London last night rather than Bristol...
Anyone else want to explain?
I got the urge to sit down over a few beers and talk geek stuff
p.s. why is the submit and preview buttons the wrong way round?
button order
Bumppo on 2002-03-30T22:56:50
p.s. why is the submit and preview buttons the wrong way round?
They're fine. You should preview before you submit, and the Preview button is on the right, in accordance with English left-to-right text orientation, with browser Back-Forward orientation, and for good measure with the Mac HI guidelines.
It's Windows that's the wrong way round.
-nat
I don't often go to Perl Monger events, since they emphasise quite what's wrong with the Perl community - egotism, pedantry and ingratitude, writ large.
Some people, it seems, have misinterpreted this to mean that I'm stopping Perl development (which, if you look back in my journal, isn't amazingly true, since I'll still be doing stuff. Lots of stuff.) because of the egotism, pedantry and ingratitude.
*sigh*. No, you've missed the point. I'm retiring because I don't have time to do the stuff that people expect me to do and I'd rather do the stuff I find fun when I can. I'm retiring because I'm knackered. I spent nearly two years working almost full-time on Perl hacking, to the possible detriment of my degree, and that's enough to tire anyone out.
The egotism, pedantry, and ingratitude is pretty much part of any community, and is irrelevant to the fact of my retiring. I just don't like it.
And to those who think I'm egotistical - what took you so long to work that out?
Re:Misinterpretation
TorgoX on 2002-03-31T00:22:55
I spent nearly two years working almost full-time on Perl hacking,...AND book-writing!
