I guess when one builds a language (Perl) modeled after a natural language (English), one attracts quite a diverse crowd, as basic literacy was the only requirement...
Compare that to Haskell, modeled after mathematics, which attracts folks who thinks in higher-order logic... And as you could imagine, exchanges like the one you cited was quite difficult to express in equations.
On the other hand, civilized exchanges like we see in ycombinator.com is quite difficult to express in equations, too... :-)
Troll alchemy - I mean troll hugging - is a subtle art, and it took us many years to get the main development channels into reasonable civility.
For example, http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today has been quite gentle for the past 5 years or so.
I guess when one builds a language (Perl) modeled after a natural language (English), one attracts quite a diverse crowd, as basic literacy was the only requirement...
Compare that to Haskell, modeled after mathematics, which attracts folks who thinks in higher-order logic... And as you could imagine, exchanges like the one you cited was quite difficult to express in equations.
On the other hand, civilized exchanges like we see in ycombinator.com is quite difficult to express in equations, too... :-)