Re: PERL as shibboleth and the Perl community

[Anonymous Monk]

I realized the problem is that many separate things I believe were getting collapsed and miscommunicated.

merlyn, on the one hand you want everyone to agree with the way you think, and on the other hand you want to be loved.

When you're not loved you assume you're not being understood..

It might help you to understand that people think differently to you. I know that some people, like you, like my own father, really struggle to get the concept of "someone else".

Truth is you don't need to be loved by everyone. You can have hard, cutting opinions, but you need to be secure in yourself and be prepared to be unloved. If you want everyone to love you then you need to be a doormat. There is middle ground.

But, in strictly logical terms, unlove != misunderstanding. Hope that helps.

[spiritway]

"Love" would be too strong a word, but I certainly respect merlyn. I think he was just trying to be understood, not looking for universal approval. Disagreement isn't lack of respect; nor does it always mean someone has misunderstood. It's just part of the give and take here at the Monastery, one of the features that makes it so helpful. There's room here for everyone, even if we disagree with them sometimes.

[merlyn]

I think he was just trying to be understood, not looking for universal approval.

Correct. In fact, I expect disagreement on some of the points. But in the previous thread, I recieved confusing (to me) responses to my posts, and realized that I was being misunderstood. So I took the time to step back and clarify my own reasoning before making any more attempts to communicate my specific points.

It was an interesting exercise, because I first just started listing about a dozen "I believe ..." statements in an outlining tool, and then I started to see a hierarchy of beliefs, and rearranged the points in a proper nesting. Once I had the nesting, I knew how to explain it better, and that resulted in the post at the head of this thread.

Are they all valid beliefs? Hard to say. Like every belief, I will find a world that correlates with that belief, opening some doors and closing others. Do I like the world I live in? If so, keep the beliefs, and if not, discard them. I'm very pragmatic that way. {grin}