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Postings from August 2023
Re: I partially disavow (was Re: PPC Elevator Pitch for Perl::Types)
From:
Ovid
Date:
August 20, 2023 10:28
Subject:
Re: I partially disavow (was Re: PPC Elevator Pitch for Perl::Types)
Message ID:
CA+M4CHtRQvajCUaGLjcSMNcCSnOGs=j0MB3GUu=nciycqVb_kw@mail.gmail.com
On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 8:47â¯PM Oodler 577 via perl5-porters <
perl5-porters@perl.org> wrote:
> If anyone is interested in being part of the Perl::Types Committee
> moving forward, please let me know. We have regular meetings and
> formal levels of membership depending on interest, intellectual
> contributions, and actual time given. Membership works by existing
> members "sponsoring" (or vouching for) existing members...
And that's the problem. With the Corinna project, I was not a gatekeeper. I
was doorman, welcoming people. There were people who strongly disagreed
with me. It was painful at times, but the end result is far better. But
this strange gatekeeping has precedence and the context is important.
Will Braswell is the chairman of your committee. On his private "Perl
Programmers" group on Facebook, he recently had a meltdown, attacking
prominent members of the Perl community (not the first time he's done
this), shared private conversations without permission, deleted many posts
and replies which called him out on his behavior, and banned discussions of
programming languages he does not approve of, unless it's to attack those
languages. He also banned some people from the group (why I was spared,
when my responses were deleted, is a mystery).
Worse, he continued this in a bizzare "Perl Town Hall" video,
self-proclaiming himself the world's #1 Perl promoter, in a video only
people in his personal group are allowed to see. He continued to attack
people, talking about how they were hurting Perl. The whole thing was very
ugly and many people left the group (note: if anyone joins his group, you
won't see much of this because of Will's mass deletions).
Around the time of Will's meltdown, he arrived in the Oshun project
<https://github.com/orgs/Perl-Apollo/discussions/27>, calling our system
"fake types", suggesting that we were deliberately ignoring his work
(wtf?), and from the video *he linked*, he said this:
"All of the type systems that you will find, except for one, that I
happened to create, that is what this talk is about, are fake in the sense
that they do not actually access the underlying C data types. They're just
some syntax sugar to make you feel cool, or there's something that's maybe
special data types that have been created that are not the actual core data
types in Perl that we're going to teach you about."
He said this while showing a picture of Elon Musk smoking marijuana, with
the words "this type system smells funny." This is setting the stage very
clearly.
And how did I react? I politely called him out on his comments, and then *I
welcomed him*. I expressed a willingness to discuss different ideas, and
after some discussion, I asked three simple questions about his work:
1. Can it be easily disabled if there's a problem?
2. Does it allow "gradual typing"?
3. Can it interoperate with existing Perl code?
Those are not difficult questions, but in case there was confusion, I
explained why I was asking those questions. They have never been answered
and on August 12, I closed the discussion because there was no discussion.
A few days later, you show up on P5P to try to promote Perl::Types, but you
left a few things out.
You have no code. You have no tests (RPerl tests don't count because we're
asking how it works with *Perl*). You have no documentation. You have no
specification.
For a speculative query, none of that is a bad thing. You're exploring
ideas. I get that. But I had three simple questions which were never
answered. I asked them again, and they were still not answered. In digging
through the code, I thought *maybe* I have an answer for the second one.
You finally answered the first one by mentioning it to someone else (thank
you!) and you still have not answered that third question.
Given that "RPerl" is a thing that's been around for a while, I would
imagine that having the creator of RPerl handy would make it easy to answer
those questions. You don't need a committee to answer them. So either you
can't answer them, or you won't answer them. Neither of those is good.