alt Hacker NewsI don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.
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I was never a perl programmer, but this was my impression of basically every perl programmer I have interacted with.
Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html
Larry should be remembered for the development of "patch" more than perl. Without the concept of fuzzily applying patches to modified source files you can't have "git rebase" or "git merge".
Individuals are rarely (not never, but rarely) the full problem. Groups of people are what cause feedback loops and cultural reinforcement like the author describes. Sometimes this is a virtuous reinforcement cycle but more often than not the well gets poisoned over time.
My anecdotal experience was with perl guys who were ex-military, irreverent, and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. The Java and .NET guys were straight laced and nerdy.
Larry was (and presumably is, but I'm out of that loop) a gem. The Weird Al of programming languages. Hilarious and kind.
But those who remember the regulars of, say, efnet #perl (THIS ISN'T A HELP CHANNEL), there was a dearth of kindness for sure. I was probably part of it too, because that was the culture! This is where the wizards live, why are you here asking us questions?
Like cms, I'm also hesitant to name names, but the folks I'm thinking of were definitely perl-famous in their day.
There were also a bunch of great people in the community, and they helped me launch my career in tech in the 90s, and I have close internet friends from that community to this day (and great memories of some who have passed on). But there were definitely also jerks.