Ribasushi's civility-free zone

TL;DR: I just finished and gisted a transcript of a Russian Perl podcast discussing Perl's future, and many other things. I made it with the strong belief it will be very beneficial to have access to yet another point of view during certain future events.

Read on for my take on the subject of communication.

I am fortunate to know several languages - some of them rather well. This allows me, among other things, to lurk around the Russian-speaking chapter of the Perl community. While it is full of able, smart, passionate programmers, they have surprisingly little interaction with the main Perl echo chamber. These folks are very much like any familiar YAPC::NA/EU participant, though at the same time they are a little different. For an average descendant of the mighty soviets these differences can be summed up as: There is the unfortunate language barrier. There is the difference in technical priorities favoring efficiency above everything. And last but not least there is the radically different threshold of general offensensitivity.

Oftentimes the only contributions crossing the resulting divide are the ones able to survive on technical merit alone (this is also true to a large extent for other sub-communities, e.g. the Japanese and Korean ones). This is a pity because all these folks have some very fresh ideas, which they are capable of expressing much clearer, given the relatively low fear of offending someone.

I strongly believe we as a larger community need more such open unabridged communication on thorny subjects. So when I listened to a recent podcast I said to myself "This is awesome! Even if I violently disagree with most of what these guys said, it is awesome they are saying it!". So I had to help - after getting an enthusiastic approval nod from the participant and after many hours of "Jesus on a segway: what was I thinking - this is really hard!", the above mentioned transcript is finally here.

I hope to make some more translations in the future, and would be really happy if folks with good command of other languages join me in this effort to cross-polinate our idea pool.

One last suggestion for the readers of this and future texts - try your best to ignore the delivery and focus on the content, as hard as it may be at times.

Cheers