Type of talk: Technology

Title: TOOWTDI (There's Only One Way to do It)

Abstract:

Perl's official motto is "There's more than one way to do it."  But
our support forums don't actually espouse these principles.  It
appears that beginners find it more and more difficult to get help in
public forums such as comp.lang.perl.misc unless they adhere to a
certain culturally approved coding style, even in trivial example
programs.  Well-known experts in these groups are focusing
increasingly on trivial syntactic details and less and less on
actually being helpful, even though Larry Wall has said many times
that it is "Officially Okay to program in a subset of Perl".

I will present many examples of this disturbing trend toward
programming language orthodoxy, from Usenet, mailing lists, IRC, and
Perl-related web sites.  I will explain why this trend is harming our
community, and show alternative modes of discourse that I think are
more productive.

Speaker: Mark Jason Dominus

Speaker Biography:

Mark Dominus has been using Perl since 1992 and has been posting to
Usenet since 1987.  He is a moderator of the comp.lang.perl.moderated
newsgroup and an operator of the #perl EFnet IRC channel.  His article
about "Why I Hate Advocacy" on www.perl.com last year was widely read
and discussed on slashdot and elsewhere, and his article about why
Usenet questions go unanswered is frequently cited.