Saturday, November 12, 2011

$ primes for money

The thesis above sounds uncontroversial.  It is also rather uncontroversial that '$' is relatively frequently used when programming in Perl.  Now - what can be the consequences of that?
Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.
from one of the first links in the query above.  Pretty sad - can that apply to the Perl community? Another link from that list, an entertaining BBC video report suggests also some other effects: hunger and pain insensitivity.

1 comment:

toapole said...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20848-the-secret-life-of-pronouns.html?full=true