Re^4: The Social Network

[Jim]

No psychology, really — reverse or otherwise. I was just tacitly inviting Meditations on the topic.

I suspect this is the highest profile reference to Perl in popular culture in a long time — maybe ever. You don't just see a snippet of Perl code on a computer monitor — which you do — or a Perl book on a shelf in the background. In an important scene at the beginning of the film, Perl is prominently mentioned in the voice-over narration of the Mark Zuckerberg character reading Zuckerberg's own real online diary.

To me, it's odd that on the preeminent social networking Web site for the Perl community, PerlMonks, there's no discussion of this reference to the Perl programming language in the movie that was ranked number one at the box office in the U.S. this weekend.

[Your Mother]

I do think it's interesting and cool and I'm glad you brought it to everyone's attention; ++. I think you misinterpret the reasons no one is discussing it. You'd have to pay me $250 to watch this movie and I suspect many Perl hackers are in the same camp. We're interested and glad Perl got some props but the social networking story itself is intrinsically uninteresting to many of us.

[Jim]

Really!? Why? Why is the story of Facebook — however freely dramatized and fictionalized — "uninteresting" to Perl hackers?

As so often happens, I don't get it.

[Your Mother]

Maybe I shouldn't have looped in others though I think quite a few feel the same way but I despise Facebook. I wrote a handful of paragraphs explaining why, but it came off fairly offensive and insulting so instead of me being insulting I'll just let Mark Zuckerberg do it as he did when he described his users for their willingness--nay, their eagerness!--to throw away their privacy as "Dumb #µ¢%s."