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| {{DISPLAYTITLE:Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer}}
| | == References == |
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| ''This article is part of the [[Portal:Essays about The Virtuous Perl Programmer|Virtuous Perl Programmer]] series and the '''Virtuous Programmer Initiative'''. It is a MediaWiki edition of the author's paper of the same title; the prose and argument have been retained while the LaTeX formatting has been adapted for the wiki.''
| | <references> |
| | | <ref name="Wall1996">Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz, ''Programming Perl'', 2nd ed. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates, 1996.</ref> |
| <div style="text-align:center;">
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| Brett Estrade (OODLER)<br />
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| Acutis Computer & Data Consultancy <ref>A DBA of Coastal Computing Services, LLC. Correspondence: [mailto:brett@acutisdata.com brett@acutisdata.com].</ref><br />
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| Science Perl Committee, The Perl Community<br />
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| Perl-Guilds.net / The Virtuous Programmer Initiative<br />
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| Houston, Texas, USA<br />
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| September 2026
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| | |
| </div>
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| [[File:aristotle-sheila-terry-230968414.jpg|thumb|right|360px|alt=Aristotle|Aristotle, whose account of virtue and human flourishing provides an important philosophical foundation for the framework developed in this paper.]]
| |
| == Introduction ==
| |
| When Larry Wall introduced the Perl faithful to the “Three Virtues of a Programmer”—''laziness'', ''impatience'', and ''hubris''—he also explained exactly what he meant <ref name="Wall1996" />. The explanations are far more important than the provocative labels. Taken literally, the three words name dispositions traditionally treated as vices; taken in Wall’s intended sense, however, they point toward habits of judgment, energy, craftsmanship, and responsibility that can genuinely serve a programmer and a community. This paper argues that the Perl community can speak more accurately about those habits by naming the virtues Wall actually described: ''Practical Wisdom'', ''Spiritedness'', and ''Good Order''.
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| | |
| The intended audience remains first and foremost the Perl community. The wider claim is modest: because programming communities inevitably develop ideas about what makes a good programmer, maintainer, contributor, and steward, Perl’s unusually explicit vocabulary of “virtues” offers a useful case study that readers from other technical communities can understand. The purpose is not to replace Perl’s culture with an abstract ethics of software, but to recover and clarify something already present within Perl’s own culture.
| |
| | |
| This essay is also written openly from the standpoint of a Catholic Perl programmer. Catholic and classical virtue traditions provide much of the vocabulary used to interpret Wall’s descriptions, but the argument does not require every Perl programmer to share that standpoint. A reader need only ask a practical question familiar to every open-source community: what habits help people use technical power well, work together fruitfully, and hand on something worth maintaining?
| |
| | |
| === Virtue, Vice, and the Long Tradition Behind Them ===
| |
| The language of virtue and vice belongs to several ancient traditions. Scriptural wisdom literature repeatedly distinguishes habits that lead toward a well-ordered and flourishing life from habits that lead toward disorder. In classical Greek philosophy, Aristotle gave one of the most influential systematic accounts of virtue, describing moral excellence as a stable disposition ordered by reason toward ''eudaimonia''—human flourishing—and often situated between characteristic extremes of deficiency and excess <ref name="Aristotle1999" />.
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| | |
| Christian thinkers later received and developed this classical vocabulary. St. Thomas Aquinas integrated Aristotelian moral philosophy into a Christian account of the virtues, giving prudence a governing role because it applies right reason to action <ref name="AquinasST" />. Other Christian writers emphasized how otherwise good powers can become distorted when separated from truth, right ends, or the other virtues. This language later appeared in many forms of civic and character education, including chivalric ideals and, much later, the Scout tradition.
| |
| | |
| The point here is not to claim a single unbroken historical chain for every virtue named in this paper. It is to identify a durable pattern: virtue concerns the good use of human powers. A capacity can be deficient, rightly ordered, or excessive. Courage can become cowardice through deficiency or recklessness through excess; prudence can collapse into shortsightedness on one side or endless deliberation on the other. The same pattern is useful when examining the habits celebrated within a programming community.
| |
| | |
| === About Objective Truth and Human Ends ===
| |
| Underlying both classical and Christian accounts of virtue is the claim that a virtue must be oriented toward what is true and toward a genuinely good end. Aristotle’s practical wisdom requires sound judgment about circumstances and ends; in the Thomistic tradition, prudence guides action rather than merely admiring clever possibilities. Chesterton’s later warning about virtues that become detached and “go mad” expresses the same practical concern from another angle <ref name="Chesterton1908" />.
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| | |
| In programming, truth has an unusually concrete presence. Code either behaves as claimed or it does not; data either represent reality adequately or they do not; an interface either helps its users accomplish their work or frustrates them. Yet technical truth alone does not answer every question. A program can be correct and still be needlessly hostile to users, impossible for maintainers to understand, or brilliantly optimized for a purpose that does not deserve the effort invested in it. Virtue therefore concerns both truthful understanding and the ends toward which technical ability is directed.
| |
| | |
| The Perl community, like every collaborative technical culture, depends on such judgments. ''Practical Wisdom'' requires seeing the real problem rather than merely the interesting one. ''Spiritedness'' requires knowing what is worth caring enough to fix or defend. ''Good Order'' requires structures that serve people rather than rules that exist only to perpetuate themselves. When these virtues are anchored in truth and good ends, they guide the community toward clarity, cooperation, useful work, and flourishing. When that anchor is lost, even genuine strengths can pull a project off course.
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| | |
| == Perl’s Virtues ==
| |
| Aristotle’s account of virtue is often summarized through the image of a mean between extremes. This does not mean that every virtue is a simple arithmetic midpoint, but it provides a useful way to see how a human capacity can fail through both deficiency and excess <ref name="Aristotle1999" />. Table 1 gives familiar examples from the classical tradition.
| |
| | |
| {| class="wikitable"
| |
| |+ Table 1. Selected classical examples of virtue understood between characteristic extremes of deficiency and excess.
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Deficiency (Extreme)'''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Virtue'''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Excess (Extreme)'''
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Cowardice
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Courage
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Recklessness
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Insensibility
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Temperance
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Overindulgence
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Stinginess
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Generosity
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Prodigality (Wastefulness)
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Self-deprecation
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Truthfulness
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Boastfulness
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Boorishness
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Wit
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Buffoonery
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Quarrelsomeness
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Friendliness
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Obsequiousness
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Pettiness
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Magnificence
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Vulgarity
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Pusillanimity (Smallness of Soul)
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Magnanimity (Greatness of Soul)
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Vanity
| |
| |}
| |
| | |
| Applied to Perl, the same framework helps separate Wall’s memorable labels from the dispositions his explanations actually praise. Table 2 summarizes the proposal developed in the following subsections.
| |
| | |
| {| class="wikitable"
| |
| |+ Table 2. The three proposed Perl virtues viewed between characteristic deficiencies and excesses in community and project life.
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| |-
| |
| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Deficiency in Perl Culture'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Virtue'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Excess or Distortion'''
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| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Repeated manual toil; failure to learn from experience; solving the visible task without considering the total cost of ownership
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Practical Wisdom (Prudence)'''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Over-engineering; abstraction for its own sake; analysis paralysis; gatekeeping disguised as “best practice”
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Apathy toward bugs, users, documentation, regressions, or the health of a project
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Spiritedness'''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Combativeness; flame-war zeal; personal crusades; treating technical disagreement as disloyalty
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Chaotic code, neglected maintenance, undocumented conventions, or structures no one can safely inherit
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| '''Good Order'''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Bureaucracy; rigid process; purity tests; suppressing experimentation merely to preserve existing structure
| |
| |}
| |
| | |
| Here we can describe what Larry Wall meant in terms that retain his practical insight while distinguishing the virtues from the deliberately provocative names attached to them.
| |
| | |
| === '''''Practical Wisdom''' or Prudence, Not Laziness'' ===
| |
| Unlike the vice of laziness, this virtue concerns practical wisdom: the ability to make sound decisions and take fitting action based on understanding, experience, consequences, and the real end being pursued. This aligns closely with Wall’s explanation of laziness as the quality that motivates a programmer to expend effort now in order to reduce the total expenditure of effort later <ref name="Wall1996" />. The programmer writes a reusable tool, automates repetitive work, or documents a system because doing so serves future users and maintainers.
| |
| | |
| The deficient extreme is not simply “working too hard.” It is failing to learn from repeated work: performing the same tedious task indefinitely, writing disposable fixes when a durable solution is warranted, or optimizing the immediate moment while imposing avoidable costs on everyone who follows. The excessive extreme appears when foresight becomes over-engineering—a framework for a problem that may never exist, an abstraction nobody can understand, or endless deliberation that prevents useful code from being released. Practical wisdom lies in judging how much architecture, automation, documentation, and foresight the real problem actually deserves.
| |
| | |
| === '''''Spiritedness''', Not Impatience'' ===
| |
| Accounting for the passionate aspect of human nature, spiritedness encompasses the energy that makes a person care that something is broken, slow, unjust, neglected, or needlessly difficult. Wall’s “impatience” describes anger at a computer that is failing to serve human needs and the resulting desire to make software more responsive and anticipatory <ref name="Wall1996" />. Properly ordered, that energy is productive: it turns irritation into repair.
| |
| | |
| The deficient extreme is apathy. A project can decline because nobody cares enough to fix a regression, answer a newcomer, update a document, challenge a harmful assumption, or carry an abandoned module forward. The excessive extreme is familiar to every long-lived online community: technical disagreement becomes personal combat, urgency becomes contempt, and conviction becomes a crusade. Spiritedness is therefore not mere anger; it is energy disciplined toward a good worth pursuing.
| |
| | |
| === '''''Good Order''', Not Hubris'' ===
| |
| Far from harmful pride, Good Order concerns the disposition to leave code, projects, and communities in a condition that other people can inhabit. Wall’s explanation of “hubris” points toward the desire to write and maintain programs whose quality will withstand the judgment of others <ref name="Wall1996" />. At its best, that is not vanity but stewardship: clear interfaces, maintainable code, responsible releases, useful documentation, and conventions that reduce needless friction.
| |
| | |
| The deficient extreme is disorder: clever but inscrutable code, abandoned distributions, inconsistent processes, and institutional memory that exists only in the head of one indispensable maintainer. The excessive extreme is order treated as an end in itself—process that smothers contribution, style rules elevated above substance, or governance that protects its own machinery more carefully than the people and work the machinery was meant to serve. Good Order is structure proportioned to a real human and technical purpose.
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| | |
| == Integration with Open-Source Virtues ==
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| The classical Greek virtues of ''Phronesis'' (practical wisdom), ''Thumos'' (spirited courage), and ''Eunomia'' (good or harmonious order) defined the character of the ideal citizen. Rooted in the life of the ''polis'', these virtues were action-oriented, oriented toward maintaining civic balance, excellence in judgment, and readiness to act in defense of justice and collective well-being. Yet as societies have evolved—particularly with the emergence of networked, decentralized, and digital modes of collaboration—these ancient frameworks alone no longer suffice. The open-source movement, where governance is informal and authority often implicit, has prompted the emergence of a complementary ethical framework.
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| | |
| In his 1999 essay “Diligence, Patience, and Humility,”<ref name="wall1999" /> Larry Wall further articulated three virtues of a great programmer: '''Diligence''', '''Patience''', and '''Humility'''. These are not technical rules but character traits—habits of mind and behavior essential to sustainable, productive participation in shared intellectual labor. Notably, these virtues are often self-directed and interpersonal rather than outwardly political or heroic. When examined alongside classical civic virtues, they do not contradict them, but rather enhance them—modulating their assertiveness with reflection, softening their rigidity with empathy, and balancing their ambition with long-term care.
| |
| | |
| === Virtue Augmentation Comparison ===
| |
| Wall’s virtues can be interpreted as augmentative operators. They do not replace the classical Greek ideals but transform and ground them for application in collaborative contexts. Their role is not merely additive but synergistic: they enable classical virtues to function meaningfully in modern contexts, especially where authority is decentralized and consensus is valued over command.
| |
| | |
| {| class="wikitable"
| |
| |+ Table 3. Open-source virtues as modifiers of classical Greek ethics
| |
| |-
| |
| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Greek Virtue'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Augmented by'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Contribution of Wall’s Virtue'''
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Phronesis'' (Practical Wisdom)
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Diligence
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Activates judgment through persistent and careful action; bridges theory and execution
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Thumos'' (Courageous Will)
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Patience
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Restrains impulsiveness, converts reaction into sustained resilience and thoughtful agency
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Eunomia'' (Harmonious Order)
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Humility
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Opens space for mutual respect and shared authorship; discourages domination
| |
| |}
| |
| | |
| In this comparative table, we can see how each open-source virtue enhances its classical counterpart by rooting it in a practice-oriented and collaborative mindset. Diligence makes wisdom operational; patience makes courage sustainable; humility makes order inclusive.
| |
| | |
| === Synthesized Virtue Matrix ===
| |
| Combining these dual traditions yields a more resilient and adaptable ethical framework. Where Greek virtues often center on decisive action in a civic sphere, open-source virtues orient toward longevity, community stewardship, and ethical restraint. The synthesis invites not just right action, but right process.
| |
| | |
| {| class="wikitable"
| |
| |+ Table 4. Synthesized framework of classical and open-source virtues
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| |-
| |
| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Ethical Dimension'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Greek Root'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Wall’s Modifier'''
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| ! style="text-align: left;"| '''Resulting Synthesis'''
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Knowing
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Phronesis''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Diligence
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Active Wisdom: persistent insight tested through practice
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Acting
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Thumos''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Patience
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| | style="text-align: left;"| Disciplined Courage: resolve tempered by endurance and timing
| |
| |-
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Ordering
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| | style="text-align: left;"| ''Eunomia''
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Humility
| |
| | style="text-align: left;"| Collaborative Order: authority shaped through shared responsibility
| |
| |}
| |
| | |
| === Expanded Analysis ===
| |
| ===== 1. Diligence as Applied Phronesis. =====
| |
| Phronesis is the Greek conception of wise deliberation applied to practical life. It presumes experience, situational awareness, and moral clarity. However, without the habit of follow-through, even wise judgment can remain inert. Wall’s ''diligence'' injects a vital quality into phronesis: the determination to act, not once, but persistently. In a codebase, as in life, it is diligence that refines understanding, uncovers edge cases, and brings clarity to complexity. Active wisdom—phronesis enhanced by diligence—is wisdom made real in repetitive, conscientious labor. It resists premature optimization and values maintenance as much as invention.
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| | |
| ===== 2. Patience as Moderated Thumos. =====
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| Thumos denotes spiritedness: the fire of the soul that asserts, resists, and protects. It is tied to courage, honor, and drive. Yet left untempered, thumos can lead to rashness or arrogance. Patience reframes courage as endurance rather than bravado. It is not a denial of energy but its distillation. The open-source contributor often faces invisible work, slow feedback cycles, and interpersonal disagreement. Patience empowers the will to persist not in domination but in consistency. It allows contributors to disengage from ego, listen deeply, and re-enter the arena with fresh clarity. Disciplined courage arises when thumos and patience cohere.
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| | |
| ===== 3. Humility as Inclusive Eunomia. =====
| |
| Eunomia, literally "good law," is the virtue of civic order and well-structured community. It promotes harmony, proportionality, and accountability. However, in both ancient and modern contexts, order has risked rigidity or coercion. Humility softens this. In Wall’s framework, humility does not imply passivity, but rather epistemic modesty—the recognition that one’s code, vision, or solution is partial. It affirms the value of others’ insights and invites inclusive participation. Where eunomia organizes power through law, humility decentralizes it through acknowledgment of interdependence. The result is collaborative order: not a blueprint imposed, but a structure evolved in common.
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| | |
| === Implications and Synthesis ===
| |
| The synthesis of Wall’s and the Greeks’ virtues yields a contemporary framework for ethical action—especially in domains where power is fluid, contribution is voluntary, and consensus is negotiated. It is not a replacement of heroic ideals, but a recalibration. Classical virtues teach us to act with clarity, honor, and civic purpose. Open-source virtues remind us to act with care, discipline, and the humility of uncertainty.
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| | |
| This convergence is especially significant in today’s digital and institutional landscapes. Many collaborative projects—whether software, science, or civil society—depend not just on brilliance, but on patience. Not just on leadership, but on listening. Not just on vision, but on maintenance. A contributor who brings both phronesis and diligence can navigate ambiguity; one who carries thumos and patience can resist burnout and rage; one who embraces eunomia and humility can shape fair systems without authoritarianism.
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| In this light, the three classical virtues can be seen as vertical axes—orienting us toward noble ideals and external responsibility—while Wall’s virtues serve as horizontal stabilizers, grounding our efforts in sustainable, interpersonal practice. Together, they form an ethical gyroscope for civic-technological engagement.
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| | |
| == Perl’s Virtues in a Broader Programming Context ==
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| The framework developed here is intentionally anchored in Perl. Perl is unusual in having a founder who supplied the community with an explicit and memorable vocabulary of programmer “virtues,” and Wall later complicated that vocabulary by speaking of diligence, patience, and humility as complementary virtues for open-source life <ref name="wall1999" />. That makes Perl more than an incidental example: it is the community whose own language generated the question this paper is trying to answer.
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| | |
| At the same time, the pattern is intelligible outside Perl. Programming communities routinely encode judgments about good practice in slogans, style guides, design principles, review customs, release expectations, and stories about exemplary maintainers. Some emphasize readability, some minimalism, some safety, some portability, some performance, some composability. Those priorities are not identical, but they all reveal that software communities cultivate dispositions as well as techniques. They teach members not only ''how'' to make software, but what kinds of technical judgment and social conduct the community admires.
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| | |
| Perl’s contribution to this wider discussion is therefore not a universal three-item code imposed on every programmer. It is a particularly vivid case study of a community discovering that the words used to celebrate technical behavior matter. If Perl can distinguish a witty vice-label from the virtue actually being praised, other communities can likewise ask whether their own slogans still name the habits they genuinely wish to cultivate. The wider applicability strengthens, rather than displaces, the Perl-centered purpose of this paper.
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| | |
| == Technology Ordered Toward Human Flourishing: A Later Convergence ==
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| 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.
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| | |
| 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.
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| | |
| 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.
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| | |
| === Leo XIV, Leo XIII, St. Thomas, and Aristotle ===
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| 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.
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| | |
| 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.
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| | |
| The resulting intellectual sequence is useful for the present argument:
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| | |
| <div style="text-align:center;">
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| '''Aristotle → St. Thomas Aquinas → Leo XIII → Leo XIV'''
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| | |
| </div>
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| 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?''
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| | |
| === 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.
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| | |
| 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.
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| 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" />.
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| 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.
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| | |
| == When Virtues Go Mad: A Chestertonian Warning ==
| |
| G. K. Chesterton observed that virtues become dangerous when they become detached from one another and “go mad” <ref name="Chesterton1908" />. The same warning applies to the virtues proposed here. A complementary point is that a virtue can fail not only through excess, but through deficiency. The Perl community therefore benefits from examining both edges of each virtue rather than merely replacing one provocative vice-label with a more respectable word.
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| | |
| === Practical Wisdom Between Shortsightedness and Overthinking ===
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| Practical Wisdom fails through deficiency when contributors repeatedly solve only the immediate problem: manual work is needlessly repeated, local fixes accumulate, documentation is deferred forever, and nobody considers the future maintainer. It fails through excess when deliberation becomes an end in itself: architectures are designed for hypothetical futures, abstractions multiply faster than users, and “best practice” becomes a reason that no imperfect but useful solution may ship.
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| | |
| The virtuous mean is not mediocrity. It is proportionate judgment—enough foresight to reduce needless future cost, enough restraint to keep the solution answerable to the problem that actually exists.
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| | |
| === Spiritedness Between Apathy and Combativeness ===
| |
| Spiritedness fails through deficiency when a contributor simply stops caring. Bugs linger because they are someone else’s problem; newcomers go unanswered; a useful distribution decays because nobody feels responsible for it; a damaging assumption survives because challenging it would require effort. Open source cannot flourish on indifference.
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| The excessive form is equally familiar: urgency becomes contempt, technical disagreement becomes moral combat, and advocacy becomes a personal crusade. The Perl community has always contained strong personalities and strong opinions; the virtue is not the elimination of that energy but its discipline toward repair, truth, and the good of the community.
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| === Good Order Between Neglect and Stagnation ===
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| Good Order fails through deficiency when there is no dependable structure to inherit: code is clever but opaque, release practices live only in memory, documentation is stale, ownership is unclear, and useful conventions exist only as oral tradition. Such disorder eventually makes contribution harder even for talented people.
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| Good Order goes mad when structure protects itself. Processes multiply because processes already exist; stylistic purity outweighs usefulness; governance becomes inaccessible to newcomers; experimentation is treated as a threat. What began as an attempt to make collaboration easier can become a barrier to collaboration. The right kind of order is therefore ordered again toward people and useful work.
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| === Why Both Extremes Matter ===
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| Deficiencies are often easier to recognize because something visibly fails to happen: a bug is not fixed, a module is not maintained, documentation is not written. Excesses can be more dangerous precisely because they can masquerade as excellence. Over-engineering can call itself wisdom; aggression can call itself commitment; bureaucracy can call itself quality. Naming the virtue correctly is therefore only the beginning. The community must also remember the end for which the virtue exists.
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| Balanced together, Practical Wisdom, Spiritedness, and Good Order form a stable foundation for Perl craftsmanship and community stewardship. Diligence, Patience, and Humility help keep those powers integrated. The goal is not to make Perl programmers less energetic, less ingenious, or less opinionated. It is to direct those strengths toward work and relationships in which people can flourish.
| | <ref name="wall1999">Larry Wall, “Diligence, Patience, and Humility,” in ''Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'', ed. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates, 1999.</ref> |
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| == Conclusion == | | <ref name="Chesterton1908">G. K. Chesterton, ''Orthodoxy''. New York: John Lane Company, 1908.</ref> |
| This remains, deliberately, a paper for the Perl community. Its starting point is Larry Wall’s language, its examples come from Perl project and community life, and its practical hope is that Perl programmers will speak more accurately about the habits they wish to cultivate. Wall’s famous ''laziness'', ''impatience'', and ''hubris'' remain memorable jokes and useful cultural shorthand, but the behaviors he actually praised are better described as ''Practical Wisdom'', ''Spiritedness'', and ''Good Order''. His later appeal to ''Diligence'', ''Patience'', and ''Humility'' supplies an important complementary set of virtues for sustaining those powers in open-source community life <ref name="wall1999" />.
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| Dr. Christos Argyropoulos’s suggestion to examine the extremes and make the argument intelligible beyond a single language strengthens rather than weakens this Perl focus. Perl becomes a case study that outsiders can understand precisely because its community has spoken so explicitly about programmer character. Other communities may recognize analogous questions in their own cultures, but Perl remains the home of the argument.
| | <ref name="Aristotle1999">Aristotle, ''Nicomachean Ethics'', trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999.</ref> |
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| The later convergence with Pope Leo XIV’s ''Magnifica Humanitas'' adds one final perspective. This essay’s central claim predates both Leo XIV’s election and his encyclical, yet his insistence that technological power be ordered toward human dignity, the common good, and human flourishing gives contemporary expression to a very old principle <ref name="LeoXIV2026" />. From Aristotle’s ''eudaimonia'', through St. Thomas’s account of prudence, through Leo XIII’s response to the industrial ''res novae'', to Leo XIV’s response to the technological ''res novae'', the recurring question is not simply what human beings are capable of building, but what those capabilities are for.
| | <ref name="AquinasST">Thomas Aquinas, ''Summa Theologica'', trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. Originally written ca. 1265–1274; see especially IIa-IIae, q. 47 and related questions on prudence.</ref> |
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| That question belongs in Perl as surely as it belongs anywhere else technology is made. Perl is a language, an ecosystem, and a collection of powerful tools, but its highest value is realized through the people who use those tools to solve problems, create, teach, maintain, serve, earn livelihoods, build institutions, and help one another. There are many virtues that can benefit the Perl community as it moves forward, but a good beginning is to name clearly the ones already hiding in plain sight. Thank you, Larry Wall.
| | <ref name="LeoXIII1879">Leo XIII, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html ''Aeterni Patris: On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy''], encyclical letter, 4 August 1879.</ref> |
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| == Acknowledgments == | | <ref name="LeoXIII1891">Leo XIII, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html ''Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor''], encyclical letter, 15 May 1891.</ref> |
| The author is especially grateful to Dr. Christos Argyropoulos for his thoughtful review of this paper. Although he identified no material defects in the original argument, his recommendation to expand the treatment of the virtues through examples of their extremes, and to make the framework intelligible beyond Perl without losing its Perl roots, materially strengthened the present revision. His comments prompted the more explicit deficiency–virtue–excess analysis and helped clarify how the Perl community’s distinctive vocabulary can contribute to a wider conversation about technical character and stewardship.
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| == References == | | <ref name="LeoXIVBiography">Holy See, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/biography/documents/biografia_leone-xiv.html “Biography of the Holy Father Leo XIV”], Vatican.va, 2025. Records the election of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV on 8 May 2025.</ref> |
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| <references>
| | <ref name="LeoXIV2026">Leo XIV, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html ''Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence''], encyclical letter, 15 May 2026.</ref> |
| <ref name="Wall1996">Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz, ''Programming Perl'', 2nd ed. (O'Reilly & Associates, 1996). Wall's definitions of laziness, impatience, and hubris are reproduced in many Perl references; see also [https://thethreevirtues.com/ The Three Virtues of a GREAT Programmer].</ref>
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| <ref name="Aristotle1999">Aristotle, ''Nicomachean Ethics'', translated with introduction, notes, and glossary by Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Hackett Publishing Company, 1999).</ref>
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| <ref name="AquinasST">St. Thomas Aquinas, ''Summa Theologiae'', especially II-II, q. 47, on prudence. [https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3047.htm Online edition].</ref>
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| <ref name="Chesterton1908">G. K. Chesterton, ''Orthodoxy'' (1908), especially the discussion of virtues that become isolated and “go mad.” [https://ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vi.html Online text].</ref>
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| <ref name="wall1999">Larry Wall, “Diligence, Patience, and Humility,” in ''Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'' (O'Reilly, 1999). [https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html Online text].</ref>
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| <ref name="LeoXIVBiography">The Holy See, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/biography/documents/biografia_leone-xiv.html “Biography of the Holy Father Leo XIV”].</ref>
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| <ref name="LeoXIV2026">Pope Leo XIV, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html ''Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence''], 15 May 2026; promulgated 25 May 2026.</ref> | |
| <ref name="LeoXIII1891">Pope Leo XIII, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html ''Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor''], 15 May 1891.</ref>
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| <ref name="LeoXIII1879">Pope Leo XIII, [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html ''Aeterni Patris: On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy''], 4 August 1879.</ref>
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| </references> | | </references> |
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| '''Series:''' [[Portal:Essays about The Virtuous Perl Programmer|Essays about The Virtuous Perl Programmer]]
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| '''Related:''' [[The Real 3 Virtues of Perl]]
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| [[Category:The Virtuous Perl Programmer]]
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| [[Category:Virtuous Programmer Initiative]]
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| [[Category:Perl Guilds]]
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