2024 Golden PERL Award voting ends 6/27 4PM PDT

[oodler]

Sorry I didn't get this out here earlier, but Perl Community (parent org of the Science Perl Committee that is initiated the Science Track) is giving out a "peoples choice" award at the end of Conference Lightning Talks. It's sincere gesture from us and allows anyone to vote for anyone in the Perl community at large, as a "thank you" from us.

link to Google voting form

The Science Track talks have been great, some are even starting to come online. Thanks to everyone who made this happen, especially the TPRC Planning Committee.

[hippo]

I have no doubt that this is all sincere and well-intentioned but it raises 2 pretty important questions.

Perl Community (parent org of the Science Perl Committee

What on earth is this? Are you saying that someone within the Perl community has decided to create an organisation called Perl Community, knowing full well that this phrase (but in sentence case) has been universally used to mean something else for the last 35 years? What is this organisation, who runs it, where's their website^*? I'd try searching but guess what - all I'll find are references to the Perl community instead.

link to Google voting form

What's the story here? The Perl Community (big C intended) can't even construct or host a simple form and handler so they abdicate responsibility to the anti-privacy behemoth that is Google? To fill in this form I'd need a Google account and sign in with it. That's a poor choice and it reflects badly on the [Cc]ommunity.

I can only presume that this entire thing was decided on at the last minute and some poor volunteer was sent scrambling around for a quick form service.

^* I see by peering behind the login panel that the google form includes the domain of the Perl Community organisation and from there we can divine their website. It looks to be Will_the_Chill's project, according to the copyright notice. But there's no mention of "Perl Community" being any legal entity.

While I support the general thrust of what they/you are trying to achieve, the details and the optics are not great. If you have input, please consider at least dropping the Google forms requirement for any future polls. I think we all know a perfectly good community website which has been running polls for almost a quarter century. That's a far better choice IMHO.

[cavac]

Are you saying that someone within the Perl community has decided to create an organisation called Perl Community, knowing full well that this phrase (but in sentence case) has been universally used to mean something else for the last 35 years?

To quote one of my favourite movies: "Grab what you can, give nothing back". This is probably the future that awaits us:

Perl(¹) Community(²)

(¹) Registered Trademark

(²) "Community" is a patent-pending technology by XYZ Corp, Silicon Valley

[perlfan]

Here is the very first talk of the first day of the first Science Track - Structure Based Structuring of Unstructured Data - Adam Russell - TPRC 2024 The Perl and Raku Conference - Las Vegas, NV 2024

When they get all up, I'll post all the Science specific talks. Cheers!

[cavac]

The list seems mostly people who are doing a lot of work in the public. I voted "other" for our beloved Sullivan Beck (SBECK) for tirelessly maintaining Date::Manip.

It's not "glorious" work that will get you on the front page of a newspaper. But it's the kind of work that is necessary for a programming language, it's neverending and it affects a lot of production critical code paths (so errors are not an option).

A lot of this kind of work goes on "behind the scenes" for every programming language. I think it's important that we, as a community, show our appreciation not only to the publicly visible people. You know the ones that pop up in news items and at the top of release notes. We should give our thanks and our support for the people who single-handedly maintain critical parts of our unseed infrastructure.

I only had one vote to give, but there are at least three similar dozen maintainers of irreplacable code i could list in a couple of hours just by looking at my own softwares dependency graphs.

[Anonymous Monk]

I love this idea and think Sullivan Beck deserves a White Camel for that work. I know when calls for that come around, they're on my list, as well as anyone else who has those kinds of jobs. Recognition like that is definitely and supremely overlooked but so deserved. I think people with that amount of unrecognized work deserve recognition with more gravitas and consensus around why they are deserving.

For an award like this, I would like to campaign for myself. I've never programmed Perl; I've helped coordinate and Run numerous Perl Conferences, including two YAPC/ TPRC. As a more flashy front of the news but no substance person inside the community, I think an award like this that is fraught with drama and confusion as to its intended meaning should go to someone who also has been caught in some drama and has a vague connection to the Perl Community.

I know self campaigning is uncouth, but those are my thoughts on how best to use this award.

Trog
Mark Prather