[Chicago-talk] Introducing Myself

Wed May 30 11:30:30 PDT 2007

Hi all!

First of all, the purpose of this email is two-fold:

1. A Netiquette question: what topics are considered on-topic for fresh
discussions, and what aren't? 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Obviously a Perl technical question is on-topic
and so are activities discussions. But are philosophical, advocacy, etc.
questions on-topic? Is comparing Perl to Python/Lisp/Intercal/C/Assembler 
on-topic? Are links to jokes about Perl on-topic? (Excluding xkcd.com of
course, which everyone and his sister-in-law reads.) 

Are discussions about related computing topics such as UNIX, email servers,
editors, etc. on-topic? Etc.

I'm asking because I already got burned twice in London.pm where I discovered
that their everything-is-on-topic policy is actually 
"everything-is-on-topic-except-some-things-that-aren't". They used to discuss
Buffy a lot, but frowned upon me London.pm-ing a Star Trek episode I started
writing (even thought it had some Buffyism). Then I posted an email with some
Perl jokes I generated and collected, and was banned from the mailing list.
Maybe it was annoying, but it was amusing, and was certainly on-topic. So I'd
like to make it clear.

On the Freenode IRC channel, most channels (including #perl) have a 
"off-topic-is-on-topic" policy, and even accept fresh discussions, although
some things are still considered bad form, or trolling. I'm not sure this
policy can really work for Email, unless it's a dedicated off-topic or
chat mailing list.

2. Introducing Myself:
----------------------

I'll try to be as brief as possible.

My name is Shlomi Fish, and my personal web site is 
http://www.shlomifish.org/ . I've been seriously working with Perl and UNIX
since 1996, when I got a work as a web programmer for one of Israel's first
web-design companies. Back then Perl was the only sane choice for writing
web apps on UNIX, which was the only sane operating system to use. And it was
what I was told to use. After learning Perl and UNIX, I realised that I 
found the holy grails of programming languages and operating systems
respectively. Before that I knew that DOS and Windows were bad, but did not 
know
why. When I used UNIX I found something that was actually good, and behaved 
well.

I'm still actively using Perl and enjoying it, as I still couldn't find a
better alternative and one that "just works". 

Throughout the years, I've worked on a lot of FOSS code, either for projects 
that I've initiated on my own, or that I contributed to projects of other
people. Most of my production code was written in Perl (probably the most of 
the Turing-complete code I wrote), C and C++, various XML based grammars and 
Website Meta Language, Bash, and Python. As much as I like learning other
languages and have learnt Scheme, Haskell, Lambda Calculus, Common Lisp, 
Smalltalk (the Squeak GUI scared me away though), etc. and found them
enlightening, I don't find them suitable for writing real-life code with,
for various reasons, but would recommend learning them, though, anyway.

Some links to the software I created can be found at:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/

Including my now over 40 CPAN distributions:

http://search.cpan.org/~shlomif/

---------------

Aside from all that I've been an essayist 
( http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/ ) and a blogger. Some of the more 
critical articles I wrote about what I perceived as unfortunate trends in the 
Perl world, and my general tendency towards tactlessness got me a somewhat 
bad reputation. This prompted me to keep introducing myself as the Perl Black 
Sheep to people who don't know me.

I probably gained some enemies, but most of the people of importance (who
I care for their opinion, and are not foolish enough to hold a lot of 
prejudice
about me) still respect me enough to co-operate with me on codebase, or to
recognise when I'm saying something of value. I suppose as far as Perl was
concerned I was off to a bad start, but I suppose having a somewhat tarnished
reputation is better than having none at all.

Plus, I'm not optimising for being loved. If saying my well-thought opinion
means receiving some criticism or even getting into online "trouble", then
so be it. Socrates got killed for speaking his opinion, and while I'll 
probably
am cautious enough not to, everyone agree that Socrates was incredibly smart,
and that he was killed for saying the wrong things for his time.

----------------------------------------

What I hate:
------------

1. Prejudice. People who think Perl is not useful because it's 
ugly/unmaintainable/too-big-to-fit-into-one's-head/yesterday's news etc. 
People
who think Mandriva (which I'm using to write this letter) is not a good
distribution because it's RPM-based and/or not as "cool" as Ubuntu. People
who think Linux does not have a decent GUI or is hard to use.[1] In short,
people who have prejudice, and "feel" instead of "knowing" or understanding.

An extreme form of prejudice is labelling - "Linux is stupid" (WDYM by 
"stupid"), "Perl is ugly" (what is ugly and why is it bad), instead of the 
more
subjective-inducing "I dislike Perl" or "I could never get used to Linux."

{{{{{{{{{{{{{{
[1] - I've known a Linux guru who installed Windows and Outlook for his
mother, because he believed Linux and Thunderbird were too hard to use. On the 
other hand, there's this evidence to the contrary:

http://mirror.hamakor.org.il/archives/linux-il/05-2005/15319.html
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

2. Irrationality. Some people simply refuse to listen to reason and 
experience.
I've recently ran into a Neo-Socialist on IRC who wondered why I asked him if 
he were indeed such, because on his homesite-qua-blog he had the word 
"interests" linked to "Socialism". I told him he should mention Socialism in
the text, but he wouldn't listen to reason.

Earlier, someone wrote a prototype for a new website for the
GIMP, and kept saying it didn't matter that it used horrible URLs like 
index.php?page=tutorials&subpage=scripting instead of better URLs that make
a wise use of PATH_INFO.

Often people jump to conclusions, personally attack me and others, make wild
accusations, blame the world at large is responsible for their problems, and
other irrational things.

3. Cruelty - I actually encountered many cases of abuse which cruelty seemed 
like the best explanation for, and it saddens me that people can be so cruel,
possibly out of jealousy and envy.

What I Like:
------------

1. Neo-Tech and Objectivism:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/guide-to-neo-tech/

2. GNU/Linux and FOSS in general. 

Mandriva Linux (Cooker) is at the moment my distribution of choice, which 
often raises some eyebrows, but I find it is the most suitable for me. I can 
still happily tolerate use other Linux distributions, and to a much lesser
extent BSD clones.

3. The Internet. Especially:
    1. Google and other high-quaulity search engines such as Yahoo.
    2. The Wikipedia.
    3. The News Sites and Blogs I like to read (see 
    http://www.shlomifish.org/me/rss-feeds.opml )
    4. High-quality sites created by individuals

4. GVim.

5. Perl and programming in general.

6. KDE.

7. Biking.

8. Writing and reading essays, blog entries, blog comments, and funny stories,
bits and aphorisms.

8. The usual things like my friends and family, good food, my country, etc.

=====================

Well, that's it for now. Now I'd like to compile the new Linus -rc kernel,
reboot and part from my 9 days uptime. (and while I'm waiting, clean up the
cruft at my home directory).

I hope I can prove to be a useful member of your esteemed forum.

Best Regards,

    Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer