x

Who?

Github: Sawyer X

Project: Perl

Date: 04/12/2021

Why?

On their post to the Perl Core group forum, they had mentioned that there was a “cruft” in the language.

Yesterday I had dared to say that people in Core recognize there is cruft in the language, and that we wish we could remove it, and that removing some cruft can make our jobs easier, whether we could remove it or not.

As a result, they claim that this just provided the community yet another opportunity to bash them.

After saying this, I immediately received hostile messages - how dare I suggest we recognize there is cruft (and that we would be happy if it weren’t there).

To the point where they deactivated their social media!

Evidently, my statement was so offensive to some that they were compelled to push me into a corner until I finally deactivated my social media account.

As mentioned above, this was another reason for the community to bash them. They then went on to talk about that this wasn’t just a one-off thing, rather it was just one instance of the multi-year bullying and hostility that was directed towards them from the community.

This is just one example in a chain of continuous bullying and hostility I’ve been receiving in recent years, especially in the last year, at the hands of Perl community members. This caused me significant emotional distress over time and I simply cannot handle it anymore - not mentally and definitely not emotionally. None of these people over the years or in recent times were apologetic or showed any remorse, nor did they heed any pleads by me or others to cease this destructive “discourse” they feel so entitled to inflict on me and others.

The culmination of this was them disengaging from the community. Fortunately, they had it in them to stay until the next release.

I am slated to release 5.34.0 in May, and I still intend to do so unless PSC and the Core object to it. Once I cut the release, I’ll remove my permissions and commit bits to GitHub, CPAN, and mailing lists.