Comment by kleiba
4 days ago
For someone not up-to-date with the Perl community, could you elaborate why Matt was considered a deeply polarizing figure, please?
4 days ago
For someone not up-to-date with the Perl community, could you elaborate why Matt was considered a deeply polarizing figure, please?
He was pretty mean to people on irc. If you didn't immediately understand what he said he'd verbally barrage you. Then again the whole perl irc community was pretty toxic.
Yeah, I tried learning Perl back in 2017 and the community was the worst I'd ever encountered. The language had so many bizarre quirks and they just treated you like an absolute idiot if you didn't intuitively get it. Left it behind and never looked back.
He would have been happy to tell you himself that he had some rough edges, would speak his mind unvarnished, and would hold strongly onto his own opinions of what he thought was right.
In my life, I've only known one person who has called me a “cunt”.
I'm sure Matt would have been happy to admit that he was that person. I'm sure he would have said that he had spoken his mind unvarnished, and maybe even that he thought he was right.
So what?
People say that a community will fall to the level of the most toxic person it will tolerate. For the Perl community, that was Matt.
Just a quick word of public interest - there are countries where the "c" word is really quite a normal word amongst friends and acquaintances, male and female. When you say that you've only ever been called that once, you maybe don't realise how much cultural information you're revealing. Seriously, look up something about the use of the word in Australia, for example. Your eyes might very well be opened.
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no lies detected
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That sounds like half this community. I suspect the issue is what those opinions were.
I did not know him at all, have no opinion on him, and sincerely wish the best for those he left behind.
> the issue is what those opinions were
Rarely, in fact.
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No reason to not say it plainly: he was regularly a total dickhead to people asking for help. But, also, he always gave people first-class expert help. They just had to "pay" by taking a bit of verbal abuse.
I spent over a decade in #perl on freenode/libera and saw so many abusive events that I eventually got tired of hanging out there, mostly due to him but in part also due to a handful of others displaying similar behavior. All the same I was always grateful for how tirelessly he spent so much of his personal time providing help, and I'm sad to learn of his passing.
Well yes, he was a total dickhead to people who asked lazy questions and could not answer the follow-up questions that they were asked. He was strict about teaching people that it is important to be able to explain one's problem clearly and follow debugging instructions, and was ruthless with people who didn't get that. On the "help" irc channels we saw a continuous flood of lazy people wanting quick solutions to their coding homework and after a while anyone would become sick of it.
I didn't much enjoy it when I was at the other end of it though, and sometimes he went too far. "Try to understand why the person doesn't understand" wasn't something he did enough -- sometimes the person doesn't know the right questions to ask, they just know that their thing doesn't work.
As a helper, it's hard to find the right balance, and I think the most important thing is that if you're getting emotional about it, step away and let someone else take the question. (I at least have been getting better at this over time.)
Yeah he always had the option to just not answer, rather than shower verbal abuse at people and push them away from the community. I only visited one or two times and that was enough, same for my colleagues.
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I don't think lazy questions deserve ire. One always has the option of spending 10 seconds simply helping someone, instead of spending 30 seconds on insults. He invariably gave everyone the full 40 seconds.
He "did not suffer fools gladly"
Every time I've heard that phrase used it's just describing an asshole
Matt was a child prodigy, and child prodigies have it notoriously tough. He and I worked closely for a while. There is someone else important in my life that has somewhat close to mst's intellectual gifts, and similarly to mst they also have difficulty controlling their reaction to other people. However, unlike this other person in my life, mst did know how to express accountability and had been on a learning process to deal with his limitations. Matt and I never had beef, perhaps because we recognised that our respective strengths and weaknesses were complementary.
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A comment this extreme could benefit from a source at least, or any sort of explanation of where you're getting it from. When you phrase it as if to make autism sound like an intrinsically negative personality trait, your comment is almost guaranteed to end up flagged/dead. Autism isn't a choice and not all autistic people are assholes.
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