obituary Matt Trout will be missed by many, even though he was a divisive figure who featured several times on The Register.
Matthew S Trout was a British Perl developer, consultant, and author. He was one of the primary authors of the Catalyst web framework, about which he literally wrote the book.
He was also the cofounder of Shadowcat Systems with Matt Keating, who posted a touching obituary on the company’s blog, appropriately titled with a phrase from Terry Pratchett: Ripples They Cause in the World.
Trout was a child prodigy and also found his way into the Perl community young – in his own words, “thrust into Perl at the tender age of seventeen by a backup accident”. His verdict on the language, from his homepage, spoke to us:
Perl is a wonderful language once you get over the fact that a slightly quirky set of syntax and embedded regular expressions have a tendency to make it look like line noise in the wrong light. Once you’re used to it, it’s a hell of an expressive dynamically typed language with a huge set of libraries and classes available for it.
Quite a few of those classes and libraries were his work. Among those with the biggest impact are the object-relational mapping library he created, DBIx::Class. Among other things, that code powers The Register. Trout also contributed significantly to Moose, a “postmodern object system for Perl 5”, and he wrote its simpler lighter alternative, Moo.
Another appreciation of his life and work comes from Curtis “Ovid” Poe, who was director of The Perl Foundation for over a decade. He wrote RIP MST, saying:
This is not a eulogy. It’s a remembrance, written from the complicated perspective of someone who once saw Matt Trout as an adversary. I won’t pretend our relationship was easy, or that he was, but I believe he deserves to be remembered in full: for his brilliance, his pain, his damage, his remorse, and his effort. There’s also a lot left out of this. Not all dirty laundry needs to be aired.
(Although the piece says that comments should be left below, the only ones we can find are in the Facebook Perl community.)
It is perhaps significant that the Register story above, which mentions both Trout and Poe, talks of resignations and actions taken by the Perl community against Trout – which he accepted, and for which he apologized.
For a moment here, I will drop the impartial third-person form. I did not know Matt Trout myself, but our lives were adjacent even if they did not overlap. Many of the things he mentions, and which are mentioned about him, match closely to my own life and experiences, from being a former UK net.goth to being Lancastrian. I have a suspicion we may even have gone to the same school. (He even calls out the XPde desktop, which I have mentioned here before.)
I have encountered angry and unpleasant comments about him, which I won’t link to. What struck me was how many of them could have been written about me, perhaps especially the negative ones. People mention his bluntness, even rudeness; his propensity for swearing; his intolerance of fools and stupid questions, and blistering responses thereto; his fondness for good beer, apparently in large amounts, and his consequent antipathy for early mornings; his passion for the things he cared about, which often could spill over into anger… and his subsequent regret and apologies. I’ve done much the same, and had similar written about me.
I’m not a Perl developer myself; he was right about the line noise. I’m not a developer at all, but many of my friends are, and I’ve been been known to attend London Perl Mongers meet-ups in the past. I think I would really have enjoyed meeting Matt. I suspect that we would have got on like a house on fire — including the flames, and the screaming, and the people running away. I am sorry that we will never get the chance.
