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A comment on Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999). Parent comment

Re:Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999) by SwellJoe on Saturday February 12, 2011 @01:29AM (#2209482)
I went through a phase like that, and I still have to be careful not to let it slip into my judging process. Larry is one of the people who helped me get over it. I've met him a few times now, and he's strikingly intelligent and thoughtful. I've met very few people of that intellectual caliber, in fact, and I've met quite a few famously smart people.

The difference between a brilliant theist and a stupid one is that the brilliant one knows enough to know what they don't know. Larry's religion, while strongly held, is not a small-minded one. The Perl community is strikingly open-minded and diverse (there are many gay folks, at least a couple transgendered folks, a huge contingent of straight men wearing skirts, and all manner of folks who choose to live differently), and Larry not only accepts this diversity, he cultivated it that way. Larry is simply not what most atheists or agnostics think of when they think of "religious person".

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Re:Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999) by doorhammer on Saturday February 12, 2011 @01:45AM (#2209513)
One of those things that attracts me to the hacker 'ethos', so-to-speak, is seeing people reaching into disparate and esoteric depths to stitch together seemingly outlandish but uniquely powerful solutions.

I've been just as guilty of being intellectually self-righteous as anyone, but these days I see elitism of any status-quo as completely counter-productive when it comes to inspiring creativity and diversity. That said, it's hard not to slip back into it, heh.

I really enjoyed the article, and while I haven't been a Christian for some time, I'd be totally stoked to meet Larry some day. He sounds like a stand up guy.

Maybe I should start wearing a skirt.

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Re:Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999) by SwellJoe on Saturday February 12, 2011 @02:29PM (#2210866)
"Maybe I should start wearing a skirt."

YAPC is in North Carolina in June. You'll fit right in. I won't be wearing a skirt, but I'm weird enough on other counts (I live in a truck, for instance, and travel full-time).

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