On identifying cargo cult items...

[merlyn]

Here's one quick way.

I see a lot of Perl code, and have been around Perl since before the Web, which makes me an old-timer now.

There's a lot of cargo-cult crap being passed around, and I've seen lots of very scary things, not so much because they are really all that dangerous, but because they keep getting passed around as a bad meme pretending to be a good meme, so scary in the amount of brain cells this mildly bad virus now occupies pushing out actual knowledge or research.

When I see the same scary thing for the 47th time in my timeline, even if it's just the first time here in the Monestary, I let loose and rail on the poor soul who happens to be the incoming infecting vector, not the source of the plague.

And then I get downvoted. Down and down and down. How dare I, someone to whom much respect is given, hurt a poor innocent only slightly lost soul?, they scream.

So, the way to know that something has reached "high cargo cult" status in the real world is to watch what I get downvoted for. It's the things that I'm tired of seeing, and don't care how I try to stop it, because it's reached epidemic proportions in the real world, even if the newbies here don't know that, and therefore don't understand why I'd be so hard on the original poster.

One clue, from me to you. Hope this helps! Have a nice day!

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker