[PSF-Community] on perl programmers

[Martin P. Hellwig]

On 30 May 2016 at 13:52, Erik Romijn <erik at erik.io> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I don’t mean to derail the discussion on board transparency, but I
> felt I could not let these particular comments go by:
>
>>> I bet even Perl programmers have good intentions!
>>
>> They are good at hiding it.
>
> In my opinion, these comments are disrespectful and not inclusive.

I applaud your intention of assuring the community is inclusive,
something I believe is a shared opinion on this list. However the way
you have chosen to voice this raises some concerns with me. I think it
is hard to find anyone in the Python community who really believes
Python programmers are superior over Pel programmers, as much as I
doubt that you can find anyone in the Perl community that really
believe that Perl programmers are superior. Of course there will be
outliers that truly believe that, but as stated these are outliers,
and I doubt they are really part of their respective community.

The part what concerns me is that you find it necessary to speak on
behalf of the people you assume are supposedly disenfranchised, if
there are people offended by this they are very well capable of
standing up here and saying for example: "Well Perl may be a write
only language, but Python is read only and doesn't get things done!".
By choosing to speak for them, you are actually disempowering them
from speaking for themselves.

Inclusion and equality is not achieved by speaking on behalf of
others, not even by positively discrimination of groups (you are still
negatively discriminated other groups), but by removing barriers and
giving *everyone* the opportunity to voice their opinion regardless of
who/what/where/why they are. Sure this means that the most common
opinion will be heard most often, but that does not mean that uncommon
opinion are any less valid.

Don't let good intentions translate to holier-than-thou approach, or
you might as well end up as a group that censores the Life of Brian
and totally missing the (absence) of the point. The appropriate
response of being taken the piss is off is laughing if it is funny or
a raised eyebrow and in extreme cases an "O'RLY" if it isn't.

-- 
mph