And then it was already over.

THANK YOU ORGANISERS!

Thank you Wendy for the photo.

And thank you sponsors.

See you in Bern next week,
:m)

Just because I was curious I took a peek at various fellow Perler's computers displays. Quite familiarly with hacker's displays there was lots of text; not a small amount white on black.
Today however I learned that there are people using light-blue to dark-blue on black as their favourite colour scheme. Like so:

After the workshop we even had to queue up in front of the gentlemen's toilets, there were so many of us. Must be all TIOBE's fault.
(If you don't get the joke, travel forward in time and have a look at the video of Richards talk.)

Only a few minutes until the Social Event starts. Looking forward to it!

:m)

After arriving in a freezing cold Berlin I rode my bike along Brandenburger Tor, Checkpoint Charly and a dozen other places of interest to the Betahaus where the Workshop takes place.

Thanks to the organisers, I immediately saw many signposts which guided me to the venue.

In the afternoon we had tasty wraps offered. And of course coffee all day long, as every attendee of a programming conference would expect. :-)

The weather was really beautiful with a lot of sunshine.

That's it for today, folks. Looking forward to two more great days in Berlin!

Liz, thank you for the photos!

The Streuselkuchen. The coffee. The snacks. The drinks. THE ICECREAMS.

How the essential things worked like charm. The Germans are winners. :-) This is no news to the fans of the English Football Team. Thank you very much, organizers. (bow)

The lunch break in the city park.

The Talks. The broad range of interesting topics. The "informativeness" of the talks. (I have not attended one single talk where I had the impression that the speaker gave the talk to hear himself speak.) I used the feedback forms for individual feedback, and so should you, I think. It's about talking to people rather than about them (publicly). Nice things can always be said, so again: Thank you, speakers! ;-)

The cool air in the Frankfurt.pm auditorium which escaped from a bunch of holes in your front neighbour's seat. Put your fingers inside and feel the cool breeze!

The cool(er) air in the toilets downstairs. It's the little tricks that make life better. ;-) A well known fact to Perl folks, I guess.

The Perl 5 shirts. The Perl 6 shirts (noticed how they replaced the apfelwein with beer?). Larry's Perl * shirt.

Frankfurt by night, especially der Eiserne Steg.

The rising attention to Markeating. ;-)
Perl certainly was the Hottest Programming Language in the world for three days. Everybody in the world should know this as a fact. :-)

The nice people. The geeks. Men in skirts. Yeah really, I think it looks great and it must certainly be very comfortable.

Frankfurt by bike. Really nice.

The journey home with a very pleasant feeling inside. Looking back on three great days of my life.

(The fact that I have just learned not to push the "Save" button in Movable Type before finishing an entry. (blush))

(I also would like to encourage everybody who watches and appreciates the live streams to drop a little thank-you note here.)

my %mails;
open my $csv, '<', 'my.csv' or die $!;
while (<$csv>){
    my  $mail = ( split(/\t/) )[4]; 
    $mails{$mail} = 1
}
say foreach sort keys %mails;

(and how do I indent code on blogs.perl.org?)
thx @Aristotle

For everybody who missed it, come and join us next year! I will keep you posted on that.

cheers
:m)

I'm considering a rewrite of my module Image::BoxModel which unfortunately never got far and is "a little" messed up in design.
I mainly use it to draw bar charts with ::Chart, and I think I am the only user. At least I don't have notice of anybody using the module. I can feel free to change whatever I want to.

Now, should i do it in Perl 5?
Perl 6?
Use Moose?
I see pros and cons.

As for Moose, I'm uncertain if I want to minimize dependencies or maximize fun.
As for Perl 6, I'm wondering if it is ready and used. On the other hand, I read a little about new features of this language and I must say I'm impressed.

As nobody uses my module anyway, my main target is to learn as much as I can. (This does not include a rewrite in PHP..)

Thanks for your advice!

I needed to create some excel sheets based on automatically calculated data. Instead of copying huge amount of data I fired up my IDE, issued

use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Utility;

$workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new($myExcelFile);
$worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet($sheet);

and was ready to go.
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel has very good documentation (excellent examples included), is very complete and is really a pleasure to use.

Besides: Use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Utility to convert between different cell notations. A1 <-> (0, 0) and be aware that one is base 1 ("base A", respectively) and the other base 0.

I don't want to start another war, beware!
I just thought it could be interesting to discuss a little how you organize your coding work and show off a tiny bit why this is the best way for you.

:m)

For the non-native speakers: Do you have similar problems?

For the native speakers: Imagine reading when you are really tired. I think this should feel more or less the same than reading technical writing in a foreign language.

And then all these little jokes. I really enjoy them, but they sometimes make it really hard to get the main content.

Another question for the native speakers: How do you feel when you are reading non-natively spoken (baby) English? Are you annoyed at the many mistakes?

And then: If you compare this to computing languages? Most of us are non native speakers. At least I hope so. :-)

I feel that readabilty of my code has improved since I've started my IT bachelor studies. I'm wondering if it is because
- we are forced to learn java which enforces a lot of things
- I am much worse at java than at I am at perl which forces me to write really simple code
- I code more and am humiliated more often when trying to read my own code
- I have more confidence in my solutions and think longer before hacking.

I'm not very afraid of baby perl. I want to code efficiently and want to understand my code in a year or two.

As an example, last evening I sat one hour or so over a calculation I could not solve. I was tired, did it in excel and then tried to implement it in my listing. The line became longer and longer, the veriables more and more nested. A true monster! And - of course - it did not work.
This morning I looked at it afresh, removed the monster, replaced some sub-calculations with variables and now it works.
It is not efficient code, nor is it as short as it could be. It is even a little stupid.
But hey, I understand it without thinking a lot.

So, do you optimize your code for readability?
(Not only when you have to?) ;-)

So I finally do what I should have done at the very beginning.
I ask my questions on #email. Some minutes later I'm chatting with the authors of the modules I try to use. They expect me to ask clever questions but help anyway as I fail to do so. ;-)
My questions are promptly answered, I'm helped through the initial steps and my first "hello_email.pl" is working in no time.

What I'm wondering about is if Perl needs better help pages on the internet. Are beginners quite easily frightened away because they hesitate to ask on chat channels or mailing lists? Do we lack in a forum?

I feel that the internet has moved on while Perl still does it the old fashioned way. Simple design, mailing lists, e.g. This is not necessarily bad, to me the experience in the Perl community is refreshing most of the time.

Is it even desired to drive beginners to Perl? Or are many of us happier when they do their first steps in PHP?

Or do we need more marketing, more presence, more design (even) according to regain a certain leadership in the scripting field?

:m)