He was pretty mean to people on irc. If you didn't immediately understand what he said he'd verbally barrage you. Then again the whole perl irc community was pretty toxic.
Yeah, I tried learning Perl back in 2017 and the community was the worst I'd ever encountered. The language had so many bizarre quirks and they just treated you like an absolute idiot if you didn't intuitively get it. Left it behind and never looked back.
He would have been happy to tell you himself that he had some rough edges, would speak his mind unvarnished, and would hold strongly onto his own opinions of what he thought was right.
In my life, I've only known one person who has called me a “cunt”.
I'm sure Matt would have been happy to admit that he was that person. I'm sure he would have said that he had spoken his mind unvarnished, and maybe even that he thought he was right.
So what?
People say that a community will fall to the level of the most toxic person it will tolerate. For the Perl community, that was Matt.
Just a quick word of public interest - there are countries where the "c" word is really quite a normal word amongst friends and acquaintances, male and female. When you say that you've only ever been called that once, you maybe don't realise how much cultural information you're revealing. Seriously, look up something about the use of the word in Australia, for example. Your eyes might very well be opened.
I’m an Australian. Being called a cunt is still a really offensive thing to say to someone. You might jokingly call a friend a cunt in jest, but you say that to a stranger and you might have your teeth knocked out.
I'm not falling for any stereotypes. I'm responding to a post where someone said they'd been called that word once in their life. This surprised me, as a non-American very used to the use of that word.
As an Australian, how many times have you been called the word? In how many types of context?
It can be extremely offensive, used a certain way, yes. And it can be absolutely breezy, used another way. And context usually makes it absolutely clear, as in, there's almost never any ambiguity. Right?
dumb, sick, stupid, other adjectives - generally not negative although could be in the right context - both in the Australian and North West England (where Matt was from) context. Just watch out for being called a fucking cunt. In almost all cases that one is pretty unambiguous. I do remember at one point having a conversation with Matt about how handling East Coast and West Coast North Americans was quite a different proposition from a cultural perspective, also related to this thread.
Matt would have liked this discussion. And given that his and my mutual friend has some actual legitimate serious expertise on obscenity in the English language even more so.
In Australia/UK cunt is still very much offensive, just not maybe as much as the US. It's one of the rudest things you can call someone. Of course with very close friends it's fine, but it still depends on the person. I don't use it with my friends and I don't like it being used on me.
I know you wouldn't use it straight away in the British isles without first establishing context and familiarity, sure. But the comment I responded to said they'd only been called that once. This is culturally a world apart from countries in which the word can and regularly is used in a friendly, playful, lighthearted way.
In Australia it's even more common, and less familiarity is required before employing it. Still, of course, one has to be careful in some contexts. This isn't relevant to the point I'm making.
I am British and we don’t call each other cunt that much. Among friends with a smile on your face, ok, but otherwise it’s still probably the worst thing you can say to someone short of throwing something racist in as well. And calling a woman a cunt is sexist.
We don't call each other cunt that much, but of course we do it now and again with a smile on our face. Right.
My point was simply that the word is much more common in places like the UK and Australia, to the point where being called that once ever is very far away from my experience, enough to be quite noteworthy. A point which your comment literally confirms.
And, as everyone is rushing to point out, yes, it can be used offensively, if used a certain way. What is this apparent difficulty accepting that words have multiple uses, even sometimes the opposite thing. English is a very contextual language, tone and intonation and familiarity and etc matter hugely.
For example, your last point - calling a woman a cunt can of course be sexist, but what if you and the woman for whatever reason both decide that you like calling each other a cunt? If you think that doesn't happen in the world, in respectful and mutually caring relationships and friendships, you are mistaken. Some people simply enjoy breaking taboos, it can be healthy and playful.
I didn't comment on OP's story of being called a cunt, nor claim that they were friends, nor make any guesses about how the word in the original story was employed. From the other comments in the thread, it seems it very well could have been meant offensively in this case - but I wasn't commenting about that.
But anyway, that hardly matters - yes, I am indeed dead wrong in the made up argument you're having about the thing no-one said.
Ok so you just decided to randomly explain that cunt is not an offensive word in some cultures and in some contexts to some guy who complained he was called a cunt once and by a Brit.
No reason why someone might think your comment was connected to OP’s comment. Nope none at all. Nicely done.
No no, there's a very good reason people might think that! It's called poor engagement with the written word. Another way to refer to it would be making ungrounded assumptions and then acting like it's the agree-upon reality. Very common nowadays.
I'd like to take responsibility for your incorrect reading of my comments, but it would unfortunately make no sense.
I implore you to take a break from the insinuations and instead quote directly any part of any of my comments that shows me saying what you believed me to be saying. You won't be able to, because it simply didn't happen.
The word cunt has radically different patterns of use in the USA vs in UK/AUS/IE/NZ. More cultural knowledge is useful and good. It's perfectly plausible that OP was unaware of that fact, and I therefore thought it could be useful knowledge, for OP and anyone else, regardless of the original anecdote, but possibly related to the original anecdote. That's for OP to decide, I don't know the details.
Writing advice from some pleb with the English comprehension ability of a garden gate, who probably wrote a story about his pet dog to scrape a pass in his O-levels - truly, our civilisation descends but deeper into the abyss
I read what you wrote, it was just nonsense. What’s sad is you immediately start to lash out and act like a gigantic cunt when it was pointed out how stupid what you wrote was. No wonder you’re on a throwaway account tbh.
I never said you didn't. I said that you were misreading me. We could speculate as to what could have caused such a poor reading of such a simple point, but there are so many juicy possibilities, it's hard to pick.
> you immediately start to lash out
This is upside down - you immediately got snotty when I explained that the point you first made was in no way relevant to what I was saying.
I, on the other hand, accorded you far more patience than your low-effort misreading warranted. I attempted repeatedly to explain where you were confused, only indulging fully in riling you up (with great success, apparently) at the very end there.
And to be frank I didn't feel like I was "lashing out", as I didn't feel sincerely emotionally involved to begin with. Your original argument was laughable, and the way you immediately switched to sniping then came as no surprise.
What has happened is you jumped in with some irrelevant anecdotes, and then refused to back down when it was pointed out, and instead chose to invent a fantasy scenario where I'm making a point that I at no stage make. I've asked you to quote the moment where I say anything more than what I've now repeatedly explained to you - and you won't do it.
So no, as much as it would please you to imagine it to be true, this:
> it was pointed out how stupid what you wrote was
Has not occurred, except in the fantasy argument in your head. I don't mean that something has been pointed out and I disagree, I mean that precisely nothing has been pointed out, you've made no response, instead maintaining I'm making a point I never did.
Outside of your fantasy, then, on the off-chance that you want to step back into reality, I've made the following point, which I invite you to actually respond to instead of getting so terribly worked up: The word "cunt" is used very differently in the US than in various other parts of the Anglosphere, including but not limited to Ireland, England, Scotland, and Australia.
None of that means Matt Trout was using the word in a friendly fashion, and none of that means that the OP in this case wasn't being poorly treated by Mr. Trout.
It doesn't mean that there can't be nuance and variation in those regions of the Anglosphere I mentioned, either. For example, if you personally don't use it much, that would be - for the purposes of this point - of no relevance. Your previous monarch Queen Elizabeth probably didn't use it much either, and that, also, is of no relevance.
> No wonder you’re on a throwaway account tbh.
The real wonder is how someone on a non-throwaway account can utter such inanities and remain so unabashedly foolhardy about it.
> act like a gigantic cunt
You must have really had a hard time in the O-levels to have taken my comment so badly, lashing out with profanities and everything. My oh my. Where's that British decency and propriety the world knows so well?
No reason to not say it plainly: he was regularly a total dickhead to people asking for help. But, also, he always gave people first-class expert help. They just had to "pay" by taking a bit of verbal abuse.
I spent over a decade in #perl on freenode/libera and saw so many abusive events that I eventually got tired of hanging out there, mostly due to him but in part also due to a handful of others displaying similar behavior. All the same I was always grateful for how tirelessly he spent so much of his personal time providing help, and I'm sad to learn of his passing.
Well yes, he was a total dickhead to people who asked lazy questions and could not answer the follow-up questions that they were asked. He was strict about teaching people that it is important to be able to explain one's problem clearly and follow debugging instructions, and was ruthless with people who didn't get that. On the "help" irc channels we saw a continuous flood of lazy people wanting quick solutions to their coding homework and after a while anyone would become sick of it.
I didn't much enjoy it when I was at the other end of it though, and sometimes he went too far. "Try to understand why the person doesn't understand" wasn't something he did enough -- sometimes the person doesn't know the right questions to ask, they just know that their thing doesn't work.
As a helper, it's hard to find the right balance, and I think the most important thing is that if you're getting emotional about it, step away and let someone else take the question. (I at least have been getting better at this over time.)
I don't think lazy questions deserve ire. One always has the option of spending 10 seconds simply helping someone, instead of spending 30 seconds on insults. He invariably gave everyone the full 40 seconds.
Yeah he always had the option to just not answer, rather than shower verbal abuse at people and push them away from the community. I only visited one or two times and that was enough, same for my colleagues.
That makes sense if they're just visiting the channel sometimes. But I'm guessing they saw themselves as somewhat responsible for the community and quality of discussion in the channel, and then just walking away isn't really a solution.
Subjectively, I agree, but not everyone shares that perspective, otherwise you wouldn't continue to see the typical "Genius but angry FOSS developer" personality in various communities. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to be an asshole, obviously they think they're contributing/adding more than they destroy, hence the continued behavior.
Matt was a child prodigy, and child prodigies have it notoriously tough. He and I worked closely for a while. There is someone else important in my life that has somewhat close to mst's intellectual gifts, and similarly to mst they also have difficulty controlling their reaction to other people. However, unlike this other person in my life, mst did know how to express accountability and had been on a learning process to deal with his limitations. Matt and I never had beef, perhaps because we recognised that our respective strengths and weaknesses were complementary.
My point was that 'child prodigy' was not loose flattery or exaggeration by a friend, because he was at 'has newspaper articles being written about him' levels of child prodigy and was unarguably a child prodigy.
I totally get it, some people found his mess very difficult and it could easily lead into a death spiral. Others had a very different experience. He was certainly someone needed to be managed by those who knew him well from time to time, when possible.
A comment this extreme could benefit from a source at least, or any sort of explanation of where you're getting it from. When you phrase it as if to make autism sound like an intrinsically negative personality trait, your comment is almost guaranteed to end up flagged/dead. Autism isn't a choice and not all autistic people are assholes.
