Matt Trout (mst) was a very big deal in the Perl 5 community, although he was a deeply polarizing figure. He was a big contributor to many Modern Perl projects. I am personally very sad he's dead. I enjoyed the time I spent with him in person, and always found him personally supportive, encouraging, and helpful, although it would be remiss to not mention that a good section of other people found him a very difficult character on many levels.
He wasn't a particularly heavy HN user, but here he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mst
I did not know him at all, have no opinion on him, and sincerely wish the best for those he left behind.
Rarely, in fact.
Super smart kid, very nice to work with. I ended up supporting one of the systems he built (in Perl). I used his Cataylst Perl framework for some projects after that because of him.
Thanks, Matt, the ripples will go on for a good while.
As I said on irc:
He brought many people into the community, and encouraged their growth (like me)
I popped into the scene by sending a few Moose patches and then coming onto irc displaying an utter lack of understanding of anything
Matt set me straight, and encouraged me to send more patches and I ended up as the manager for Moose
and then inherited the ownership of literally hundreds (perhaps thousands by now) distributions
that work helped me move from being mediocre at my job to being stellar, and enabled me to move on to much better jobs
rwmj•11h ago
sebmellen•11h ago
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detaro•11h ago
ether_at_cpan•2h ago
> Perl is a wonderful language once you get over the fact that a slightly quirky set of syntax and embedded regular expressions have a tendency to make it look like line noise in the wrong light. Once you're used to it, it's a hell of an expressive dynamically typed language with a huge set of libraries and classes available for it.
the_precipice•1h ago
petesergeant•1h ago
It is beyond intellectually dishonest to not put this in context; you've linked elsewhere in this thread to Ovid's obituary, from which I'll quote:
> Third, he wasn’t a bigot. Far from it. He stood up for LGBQT+ rights. He didn’t care about your ethnicity, religion, or national origin. He was accused of philosemitic antisemitism[0], but while he admitted to me that he had hurt someone, he was bewildered by it. He thought he was making a joke; the person hearing it (someone else who I also respect) heard bigotry. For the record, I don’t think Matt was antisemitic, but I realize that this is such an emotionally-charged topic, that some will disagree.
0: https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/philosemitism