Re: Perl Golf Ethics

[rodion]

Golf is a discipline with an artificial goal, set up to provide competition among its participants, with explicit rules for the competition.

Software is a discipline with practical goals, often accomplished through cooperation of its participants, who have to tinker with the rules of cooperation and competition along the way.

While both involve ethics, intelligence and cleverness in some form, the forms these abilities take in each discipline is quite different. I believe it would be a major dis-service to the cooperative spirit of programming communities, perlmonks especially, to apply the ethical lessons from golf to our sphere, even under the guise of an analogy. It subtly undermines the cooperation, and confuses the ethical questions, and good cooperation and clear ethics are both of them hard to establish and maintain.

It is probably just as bad to reason from software to golf, but I'll leave golfers to comment on that, preferably in a golfing forum.