It took about 18 minutes 25 seconds if stat on the build log is accurate.

So now I have the new shiny...just need to reload all the CPAN modules I use now.

Huzzah!

Higher-Order Perl

Perl Language Reference Manual - for Perl version 5.12.1

PERL DATA LANGUAGE

I'm sure mjd might take exception to the title of the first book. Larry might be surprised he is the author of the second. The PDL folks might not care about the third.

I haven't looked up the licensing for the various documentation bits that looks to be put in a self-published context through Betascript Publishing and Network Theory LTD. To be fair, Network Theory LTD is donating $1 of the $30 book to The Perl Foundation. Gosh, how nice.

Very weird and not sure but I think rather disturbing.

I really would have liked to catch them but it is always interesting to talk with folks.

perigrin is a fellow player of Lacuna Expanse and it was good to meet him.

I then mostly listened to olegm and perigrin compare notes about putting on a workshop, relative costs...generally what perigrin was going to talk about after the Intro to Dancer talk. :-)

The most interesting comment was when perigrin said he would like to see a conference/workshop in each state in the US. It seems like every country in Europe has one so why not each state.

A very compelling idea, especially when you consider that Perl Oasis costs about $2,000 to put on an attracts around 40 attendees.

This module is a scheduler.

When designing a language it should be easy to edit, eyeball and parse.

It is a good idea to have line oriented and whitespace oriented tokens.

One should consider the primitives, basically what are the tasks you want to do.

Taking advantage of the overlooking ability of capturing split for grabbing tokens.

The given/when switch makes writing small languages much easier.

Once again a very good talk about an area that many people wouldn't have to do.

He likes Perl a lot, in the last few years there has been a fundamental change in Perl. Things like the modern Perl movement, chromatic's Modern Perl book, Moose, Catalyst and DBIx::Class changed how we can use Perl.

Even with all that Perl has an image problem.

What are the Perl companies we trot out: LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Amazon and SixApart.

He noted that some of them are moving on to other languages for their new development and that some have written Perl in such a way that makes one not want to ever use Perl again.

Nick then presented some of the research he was done. Looking at sites like LangPop, doing searches in sites like Craigslist and sending out a survey to the many people and groups he knows.

He had lots of interesting quotes and such that I didn't put in my notes. I'm hoping he'll put the slides up on the Frozen Perl site. Looks of data to look at and ponder.

He talked about evangelism and the communication of the Perl community with everyone else. Stuff like the Ironman challenge, how the main Perl web sites compare to Ruby (and I think Python) and some other things I forgot to write down.

There was a brief discussion at the end of his talk and brian d foy made a good point. What geeks think about marketing (and how they do it) is very different from how Marketers do it.

Thought provoking.

It was mostly how one would work with Arduinos's and the Perl interface to them.

There is a variety of vendors, arduinos and extensions that let you do all sorts of fun things.

It's probably the first open source hardware that is widely available and accessible.

Very cool and interesting stuff.

Steven Lembark gave a talk about wrapping installed subroutines.

It was noted on irc that this was the cotinuation/sequal of another talk. The jumping off point is having to work in some code and it has the following at the top of every program/module

use warnings;
$SIG{ WARN } = sub { die };

Now think about what that does...

Yes, you are now screwed.

Especially if you want to do any benchmarking or deal with some other modules.

You can muck about with the symbol table and such but one solution is the Symbol module.

Lembark chose this because it is part of the core/standard libraries (a predication of his talk). It cleans up some of the mess of dealing with globs/symbol table weirdness.

It was noted on irc that Package::Stash is a bit cleaner to use (at least its API is better).

Regardless it was yet more of Lembark showing some of the weird things that you can do (and some times have to do) and why it is better to find a module to give you some distance from that mental mayhem.

As always, he shows off interesting bits of the Perl solution space.

brian d foy gave the keynote this year. He talked about his talk from two years that was sort of based on Better Off by Eric Bende, his reading of Skeptic magazine and what this means regarding Perl.

As part of this he touched on the fashionable memes of why some hates or loves a languages, Perl in particular. Sometimes it's misinformed or ignorant hate or just as a way to validate their choice.

So he was thinking about why there is some much love, or hate, for Perl?

This led into an interview question, "What are 5 things you hate about Perl?"

This shows 3 things: real experience, depth and reach of knowledge, and workarounds used for those things.

This also relaxes the interviewee because it shows it is ok to criticise language being used/talked about.

brian then talked about what he hates about Perl. His list was things like: CPAN, licensing or reusability. He didn't go into any real detail about those.

He focused on 'use'.

What does 'use' actually do? It expands the module into a path, it puts it %INC and imports things.

This does a couple of problematic things.

• It ties the module to the file system.


• First one found in %INC wins.


• How are versions handled?


• What various installations of the module?


• What about private CPANs/darkPans?

Perl 6 sort of addresses this with something like:

use Dog

:auth (BDFOY)

:ver(v1.2..v1.4)

;

So brian was thinking about how the cpan client/module can be updated to better deal with these problems.

What does this mean? For me, I think it means I need to put more critical thought into some things, especially the tools, languages and assumptions I have been taking for granted for some time now.

For me about the only thing I could think of hating about Perl was some of the OO syntax but I don't do much OO stuff in Perl so I don't have to deal with it too much. Which means I need to think a bit more.

It's only been running about 2 weeks now so it's a good time to get in on the ground floor.

http://www.lacunaexpanse.com/

It's even written in Perl.

I blame Adam for getting me involved...and JT.

gizmo

Got checked into Morrison Towers and the conference.

Took a nap. Went to the Arrival Dinner at BW3's. Met Murry at the dinner and John on the walk back to the dorms. Had a drink at Eddie George's.

Drove to Port Columbus International Airport to pick up chromatic and Jon Swartz.

Surfed the web.

Wrote this.

Now setting an alarm and going to bed.

Either I'm doing something right or wrong.

Either way I'll be in St. Paul and will almost be able to eat my fill of pizza that I love.

We'll see how it goes.

gizmo