acme

A short sleep later and it's time for the third day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia.

The attendees dinner yesterday was great fun - hundreds of Perl programmers at Lido in an underground cavern with a wide spread of food and beer. Today I attended:

Perl 5.16 and Beyond where Jesse Vincent explained the development of Perl and his vision for an exciting future of Perl. Andy Lester summarised a previous version of this talk. Jesse has expanded on many points since, but it boils down to declaring the semantics your code expect - and future versions of Perl will attempt you give you the semantics of older versions (making deprecations easier). And making the core smaller, and shipping two flavours of Perl (codenames: "Hotel California" - like now, and "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" - just enough to bootstrap CPAN). Making the language smaller through making it possible for CPAN modules to add/change syntax and features. Making Perl run under every platform.

Introduction to writing readable and maintainable Perl, where Alex Balhatchet covered best practices for readable code with lots of little hints.

Perl Training, where Dave Cross talked "about the kinds of people who want Perl training and the kinds of training that they want".

The Legend of Data::Query - a LINQ's awakening, where Matt Trout talked about the history of the API decisions in DBIx::Class and how he's slowly evolving his ideas into what will become Data::Query.

After a tasty lunch, I presented How CPAN Testers helped me improve my module which talks about how CPAN Testers helped improve my JSON::YAJL module. You can view the slides.

Perlude: a taste of haskell in perl, where Marc Chantreux talked about how Perlude allows you to do Haskell-style lazy UNIX pipe-like things in Perl.

How I learned to stop worrying and love threads, where Leon Timmermans explaind why threads are hateful and how some playing with Erlang led to threads::lite.

And then the ever-wonderful lightning talks, which amazed and amused us as always.

As part of the lightning talks, brian d foy announced the 2011 White Camel Awards, which are all for non-technical work. The Community award went to Leo Lapworth for tireless work in improving the Perl websites. The user group award went to Daisuke Maki for organising YAPC::Asia and the Japan Perl Association. The last award went to Andrew Shitov for organising so many Perl conferences.

http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/talk/3316, where Matt Trout summarised all manner of things that have happened in the last year in Perl: lots of Perl releases, lots of IRC users, lots of CPAN Testers results, MetaCPAN. The Perl community is you!

YAPC::Europe 2012, where Max Maischein and Frankfurt.pm gave us a few details about YAPC::Europe 2012 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. They are aiming for the end of August.

It's been exciting, exhilarating and exhausting. Many thanks to Andrew Shitov, the organisers and speakers and I'm looking forward to next year!