Organizational Culture (Part IV): Perl Culture

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible

-- Official Perl Slogan, coined by Larry Wall

Haskell makes hard things easy and easy things weird

-- Larry shows his sense of humour by coining an unofficial Haskell slogan

> I cannot decide if your analogies are false since I cannot make heads or tails of them
You should try to make CARs and CDRs of them instead

-- Larry teasing (the serious-minded) functional programming community on comp.lang.lisp, Jan 21 1993

Struggling to make heads or tails (sorry, CARs and CDRs) of Perl culture, I decided to focus on Perl's creator, Larry Wall. As indicated by the quotes above - and Larry Wall wikiquotes - humour is a huge part of Perl culture. Especially compared to the PhD-powered functional programming community - for those doubting this stark cultural difference, see the "Black Perl" and "Haskerl" sections at The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part VI): April Fools. :)

Seeking further insights into Perl culture, I began reading Larry's Culture of Perl keynote from The Perl Conference of '97. I really struggled to relate to it though, couldn't make heads or tails of it. Later in the day I suddenly remembered my fluky lunch date with Larry from years ago. The strong impression I felt that day was Larry's extraordinary intelligence combined with a delightful kindness and gentleness. Combining those feelings with Larry's final metaphor from The Culture of Perl:

the theological metaphor I want to leave you with is simply that it is better to give than to receive

and this quote from the Perl Culture chapter of Programming Perl:

the only personality trait Perl programmers have in common is that they're all pathologically helpful

leads to my two primary characteristics of Perl culture:

• generosity and helpfulness
• quirky sense of humour

As you might expect from my posting history, I never could embrace TMTOWTDI, much preferring TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE (pronounced Tim Toady Bicarbonate).

What are your top two or three attributes of Perl culture?

Other Articles in This Series

• Organizational Culture (Part I): Introduction
• Organizational Culture (Part II): Meta Process
• Organizational Culture (Part III): Spaceflight and Aviation
• Organizational Culture (Part V): Behavior
• Organizational Culture (Part VI): Sociology
• Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science

References Added Later

• My primary motivation for participating at PerlMonks is:
• Why does it seem as though Perl has the only community of friendly, non patronizing or demeaning, programmers? What is with every one else?

• Re: Obtaining old versions of Perl -- Perl 1.0 (where next link is mentioned by cognominal aka stefp)
• Having it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web by Michael Stevenson, University of Amsterdam (2018)