Several days later, what do I remember from LPW 2009?
Piers' talk on New beginnings. Interestingly, it's mostly the structure of the talk that I remember, not the content. Only a few days before, Simon Cozens had pointed out a post of Yuval's, and specifically praised it as a post with good structure: Show where there is a problem, solve that problem with a particular coding technique (or technology), dont waffle too much. Simon was so impressed he posted a meta-post on the subject.
Pier's talk was about why he left Perl for Ruby, and why he came back again. Perl has some "boilerplate" code that one typically needs when writing all methods. Instead of declaring the methods incoming arguments, one has to explicitly pull them off of the argument array, @_. Piers returned because the Perl community has been solving this and similar annoyances. In this case with Devel::Declare. And it's not even a "source filter"!
Problem; Solution; Done.
Another talk I still remember is Andy Wardley's on Template Toolkit 3. It's been many years in the making, much like Perl 6^WRakudo. It's looking pretty good however, and much evolved. I made myself some TODO notes as he was talking. Andy's talk style was the opposite of Piers', so I will have to ask him later; What problems does TT3 solve (better, more elegantly) that TT2 doesn't? Why would I use it over TT2? He also zhas some ambitious ideas to add a C library so that it can be used from other programming languages. This is another good way to spread good things that come from Perl.
That's it, most of the rest is a blur. Hallway chats, hot drinks, food, books. O'Reilly were there with a table as usual, with 35% off usual prices, so I bought "Beautiful Teams" to add to my collection of projecty books.
It was good to see friends again, to actually talk to people outside the confines of IRC. I came away somewhat more motivated to join in non-work projects than of late.
So much so that I've picked up on the EPO grants again. Having been voted on, decided, had money assigned and then listed.. They've been sitting there idle, waiting for someone to speak up and offer to complete them. Maybe its a lesson in time management, these things don't run themselves, mebbe volunteers need to be able to dedicate X amount of hours per day/week to help. Oops, minor side-rant, I'll go and write that proposal now, and assign myself time to work on it!
@diary, public, perl, lpw2009
Last modified: 2009-12-11T09:17:04