As Matts has already noted, the nominations for the ActiveState Award are up. The nominees are Schwern, Matt Sergeant, Michael Peppler, Damian Conway and Bill Luebkert.
Now, grumbles about the voting system aside (there's no way that I, as a Perl programmer, am competent to vote in the other polls, I haven't the faintest idea who any of those people are for heavens' sake.
Now, as a long time supporter of Mr Conway, you'd think I would have immediately stuck my cross next to his name and made a vote. Well... no; I voted for Schwern.
Why? Because as I understood the Award, it is supposed to be for the 'unsung heroes'. And Damian, for all he's a great guy, superb speaker top notch programmer and trainer, isn't exactly unsung. Hell, he has an Award named after him.
Schwern however, is pretty much unsung outside the Perl community (and in some cases within that community), the work he's done hasn't exactly been glamourous, but the testing effort that he's spearheaded is vitally important. Because of Schwern's efforts, the perl core is better tested than it's ever been, and we have better and more immediately accessible tools for writing tests in our own modules. And this is very good indeed.
So, vote Schwern. Vote early. Vote often. Nag Activestate to allow voting in a subset of all the categories.
I haven't voted yet because I'm hoping that ActiveState will fix the voting script and allow me to only vote for categories that I'm qualified to vote in. I don't want PHP programmers who know nothing about Perl voting for one of the Perl programmers at random. It makes a complete mockery of the voting.
I guess you could argue that the random votes would be evenly distributed but I really don't think we can rely on that.
Besides, waiting for them to fix it will give me time to decide between Schwern and Matts :)
Re:Broken Voting Model
pdcawley on 2002-07-03T10:37:28
That's easy. I voted for Schwern in Perl and Matts in XSLT.Re:Broken Voting Model
pudge on 2002-07-03T13:33:05
Yeah, I saw this and thought that unfortunately Matts' votes might get split between the two categories, *reducing* his chance of winning either one. I don't think this is as much of a flaw as the "vote for people you don't know anything about" thing, though.Re:Broken Voting Model
pdcawley on 2002-07-03T13:45:43
I confess that in my case I'm not splitting my vote. If Matt were only nominated in the Perl category I'd still have voted for Schwern (What with having nominated him in the first place and all...)Re:Broken Voting Model
pudge on 2002-07-03T14:58:13
I'm also guessing that, if not you, than most Perl people, will vote for Matts for XSLT, not knowing any of the other names.Re:Broken Voting Model
Matts on 2002-07-03T16:45:29
A lot of my modules have nothing to do with XML.
;-)
Re:Broken Voting Model
2shortplanks on 2002-07-03T23:27:19
Looks like you did the right thing. Just got a mail from ActiveState saying that "voting
in each category is no longer mandatory"
I voted for Schwern.
Why? Because as I understood the Award, it is supposed to be for the 'unsung heroes'. And Damian, for all he's a great guy, superb speaker top notch programmer and trainer, isn't exactly unsung. Hell, he has an Award named after him.
...which is why, late last night when I found out about the nomination and the criteria for it, I asked ActiveState to remove my name from the list of nominees.
... consider that Schwern has also taken on maintenance of MakeMaker and Test::Harness. (Some of those MakeMaker modules predated File::Spec, and, if you hadn't read it, you wouldn't believe the convoluted inheritance scheme.) That's a job almost as thankless as being the pumpking.
