Editing Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer (section)

== Technology Ordered Toward Human Flourishing: A Later Convergence ==

The central argument of this paper was developed before Robert Francis Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV in May 2025 and before the publication of his first encyclical, ''Magnifica Humanitas'', in May 2026.<ref name="LeoXIVBiography" /><ref name="LeoXIV2026" /> That chronology is worth stating because the argument offered here was not constructed around the encyclical. Rather, Leo XIV's later treatment of technology provides a striking contemporary convergence with the older virtue framework already being applied to Perl: technical power is a means, and the decisive question is the human good toward which that power is ordered.

Although ''Magnifica Humanitas'' was written in response to a period of rapid development in artificial intelligence and related technologies, its central principle is broader than AI. Leo XIV does not portray technology as inherently opposed to humanity. He treats technological development as a profoundly human activity capable of improving human life, while insisting that tools become destructive when they are not directed toward the good.<ref name="LeoXIV2026" /> His concern is therefore not simply whether a technology works, scales, optimizes, or increases capability, but what kind of human life those powers help to build. Throughout the encyclical, the criterion repeatedly returns to the dignity of persons, the common good, integral human development, and the possibility for persons and peoples to flourish.

For a paper about programmer virtue, this is the important point. Technical excellence is real, but it is a subordinate good. Efficiency, automation, expressive power, elegant abstractions, sophisticated tooling, and even the survival of a programming language are not final ends in themselves. Their value is finally measured by the good they enable human beings and communities to pursue.

=== Leo XIV, Leo XIII, St. Thomas, and Aristotle ===

Leo XIV himself places this technological moment in continuity with Leo XIII. In ''Magnifica Humanitas'', he explicitly recalls the ''res novae'' — the “new things” — that confronted Leo XIII during the industrial transformation addressed in ''Rerum Novarum'', and argues that the Church must likewise interpret the “new things” of the present technological age.<ref name="LeoXIV2026" /><ref name="LeoXIII1891" /> The analogy is especially apt because neither pontificate begins by asking whether a new technology or economic power is simply good or bad. The deeper question is how new forms of power affect human persons, relationships, work, responsibility, and the common good.

The line can be traced farther back without pretending that every document is merely a restatement of the one before it. Leo XIII's pontificate deliberately restored St. Thomas Aquinas to a central place in Catholic philosophical formation in ''Aeterni Patris''.<ref name="LeoXIII1879" /> Thomas, in turn, received and transformed much of Aristotle's moral philosophy. His account of prudence as reason rightly governing action openly draws on Aristotle's treatment of practical wisdom.<ref name="AquinasST" /><ref name="Aristotle1999" /> Aristotle's ethical inquiry itself is ordered toward ''eudaimonia'': the flourishing life that gives individual virtues their place within a larger account of human good.

<div style="text-align:center; margin:1em 0;">
'''Aristotle → St. Thomas Aquinas → Leo XIII → Leo XIV'''
</div>

Aristotle supplies a durable language of virtue, practical wisdom, ends, and flourishing. St. Thomas integrates that moral vocabulary into a broader account of human action and the good. Leo XIII brings a Thomistic intellectual orientation to a pontificate confronting the social consequences of industrial modernity. Leo XIV consciously returns to Leo XIII's ''res novae'' at another moment of technological transformation and again asks whether human powers are being ordered toward the flourishing of persons and communities. This is an intellectual inheritance rather than a claim of simple one-to-one textual dependence, but the continuity of the question is clear: ''what are our powers for?''

=== A Perl Application: The Tool Is Not the End ===

The author writes as both a Catholic and a Perl programmer, so this lineage is not external decoration added to a technical culture from somewhere else; it is part of the intellectual vocabulary through which the author understands craftsmanship, community, and responsibility. Nevertheless, the application to Perl does not require a reader to be Catholic. The claim is practical and broadly accessible: technology is a tool, and tools should be judged in part by the human goods they serve.

Perl is itself a tool-building culture. The language, CPAN, test frameworks, automation, compilers, editors, deployment systems, and newer AI-assisted tools all extend human capability. Any of them can be used well or badly. AI is only one contemporary example. The principle applies just as readily to a regular expression, a build system, a package index, a web framework, or a programming language: increased power does not tell us what the power is for.

This is where the proposed Perl virtues become especially useful. ''Practical Wisdom'' asks whether a technical choice serves the real problem and the people who live with the solution. ''Spiritedness'' supplies the energy to improve tools when they fail those people. ''Good Order'' leaves code and institutions in a form others can inherit. Wall's complementary virtues of ''Diligence'', ''Patience'', and ''Humility'' keep technical power from becoming self-regarding: they remind the contributor that maintenance matters, that people learn and collaborate at human speeds, and that no single programmer's cleverness exhausts what a project may need.<ref name="wall1999" />

Seen this way, human flourishing is not an ornamental concept placed beside programming. It supplies the end that gives programmer virtue its direction. A Perl project flourishes when people can solve real problems, learn from one another, earn trust, maintain what they inherit, welcome useful contributions, and pass knowledge forward. Even the desire to keep Perl vigorous for another generation is best understood in this way: the language matters because of the human work, relationships, creativity, livelihoods, service, and learning it makes possible. The tool is important; the people and the goods they pursue are the reason for the tool.