“… Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.”

—  Larry Wall

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Larry Wall photo
Larry Wall 294
American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl 1954

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“Whenever you face something new, you revert to your own tribal ways. People ask me how I can live among cannibals, or tribes that practise female circumcision, and not tell them what's right or wrong. I know that's not the way to understanding. I try not to judge.”

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“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

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