Sounds like wishful thinking. My galvanic response is to agree that every Java hacker I ever knew was a jerk and every Python hacker a bigot and every COBOL hacker... well, I only knew one and he was my high school comp sci and calculus teacher and he was pretty damn nice... but it's not true. I've known a couple of awesome Java hackers and far and away the most annoying, bigoted, and time wasting hacker I ever had to work with was 100% Perl. It wasn't anyone here though. I think that's part of this place's charm. It spits out people like that pretty quickly. Sidenote: a huge number of those in prison in the US in particular don't belong there at all: Incarceration Rates . And those numbers only get more awful when you add race to the mix– South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society. What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black men at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world? - Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment Not to get a political thread started, just saying. How "evil" one is is not a direct function of how incarcerated one is.

That's all not to mention that 60% of US prisoners are there for so-called crimes which involve no dishonesty or violence. Drug laws in the US are a sad, unfunny joke. I'm not sure how that relates to programming, though, except that certain programming languages are sad, unfunny jokes, too. I won't start a flame war by naming them, and I'm sure everyone has their own favorites to name to the category anyway. Suffice it to say that Perl isn't a joke and Intercal I find funny.

Perl as a language is friendly and fun, and tends to attract people who are friendly and fun too ;-) Personally, I have learnt and used many languages over the years but have loved Perl since we met, and have stayed faithful ever since. And that is probably at least partially because something in my brain resonates with the way(_s_) Perl allows me to do things. I'd also suggest there is a correlation between Perl users and the FLOSS community in general. It's hard to be a Perl user without picking up a lot of the larger open source mind set - co-operation, collaboration, tolerance and acceptance - all of which are a Good Thing for making one's way in the world in general. As for making Perl knowledge a job requirement for holders of public office - sounds like a wonderful idea, but I recall how optimistic the U.K. media were when M Thatcher was running for PM because she was a science graduate and therefore was it was believed that she would be a more rational leader ... 'nuff said.

so i suggest that the programming language has the effect of rewire the brain somehow i also suggest that all governers, presidents, kings, and so on must know some perl to be qualified for their position by passing an international exam by the united nation. Please don't reveal the secret of how the geeks plan to take over the world. :-) I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth Remember How Lucky You Are

If there is a correlation it might not be because of learning a programming language, but rather because of the act of programming. Programming is one of the few things where 1) you can see what you produced doesn't work. FULLSTOP. and 2) there's noone to blame but you. You may blame the computer, the compiler, the teacher ... but if you persist and actually do debug the program you wrote you find out that the blame was on you. Again and again. This does teach some humility. And unteaches blaming others for your faults. Besides .. polite ne successful. More often than not it prevents success. Jenda

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perl's low defect rate must help to reinforce that effect. :) I don't think there's any causative effect, really. I think normal social effects are at play here. The Perl community has somehow managed to evolve as a friendly place. At this point it's a self reinforcing system. However, if noxious, vituperative folks were allowed to dominate the conversation, the friendly people would leave and standard Internet behavior would ensue, as the new feedback system gained dominance. The OPs thesis sounds kinda like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

TGI says moo

a doctorate thesis can be made by searching how many prisoners in jails know some perl. It would also have to take into account how many prisoners in jails are innocent -- there's bound to be a correlation between the two attributes. :D But seriously... are you trying to assert that no one has ever written evil code in Perl? Perhaps Perl has a better proportion of benevolent vs. evil code released to the world, compared to other languages (e.g. Visual Basic, x86 assembler, javascript), but I don't know how someone could possibly measure that.

I can see that you've never been flamed Tom Christiansen, to name one of many well-known Perl hackers with a well-deserved reputation for forceful expressions of opinion.