Comment by DonHopkins
2 days ago
You can't fix broken mugs with duct tape. ;)
>Partway through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things".
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Raku_Programming/Perl_History#...
Intermission: The Jon Orwant Mug-Throwing Incident in 2000
By 2000, it was evident that Perl needed an infusion of life:
"The [P5P / Perl Conference] meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Elaine Ashton, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing." [1]
https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.packrats/2002/07/msg3.h...
Andrew.Savige@ir.com [Andrew.Savige@ir.com] quoth:
*>I am interested to learn more about this incident.
*>What this really the catalyst for the current Perl 6 development?
Well...calling it a catalyst may be too dramatic a word. The meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, myself, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing.
*>How many mugs were broken?
only one. 5 were thrown but they were tough :)
*>Were they coffee mugs or coffee cups?
Coffee mugs. Standard hotel issue.
*>What colour were they?
White.
*>Did anyone keep some broken cups for later display in musuem?
No :)
*>Did anyone photograph the incident or broken cups?
No :) Thank goodness as I'd hate to have a photo of me diving under the table.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110716115800/http://www.spider... is about as close to a photo of this as you'll find :)
e.
There's a current in human affairs to be sure. By 2000 it had just about washed Perl as far east as Memphis, where it became the first language in which I considered myself to be doing "real programming," and not long after the springboard into the first 20 years of an engineering career whose last 20 look likely to embody a role Tim Leary might have purported to recognize. (The last time having a genuine conversation with a computer was really part of the public vernacular, so was he, of course! Wrong about everything as always, but sometimes provocatively so.)
I'm not sorry to have stopped working in Perl, broken cups or no; thinking back on my time with it puts me forcibly in mind of what I believe to have been Wirth's comments on the hazards of early exposure to BASIC, and "The Rails' Progress" in the late 2000s and after I would nominate as the corresponding farce.