Open Source Bridge

Excerpt

Description

Some people outside the Perl community believe that Perl 5 is stagnant and Perl 6 is going nowhere. Other people formed their perceptions of Perl a decade ago when everyone and their dog wrote Perl programs to power the web… badly. Perl 4-style programs still abound, despite fifteen years of practical experience building real-world Perl programs which are performant, maintainable, and practical. Modern Perl is a very different beast from those old stereotypes.

Perl isn’t dead, it just has a PR problem. The view from inside the Perl community is very different. We’ll show the real life of Perl 5 — including CPAN, the colossal archive of reusable software modules, and itself the largest automated testing suite in the world. We’ll explain Parrot, the new dynamic language virtual machine. We’ll show off some amazing features of Perl 6 — real code, working right now. It’s closer than you think.

Tags

perl, perl 6, undead, brains, debunking, fud

Speaking experience

Speakers

• 

  Michael Schwern

  • Website: http://schwern.net/
  • Blog: http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/
  • Twitter: schwern
  • Favorites: View Michael's favorites

  Biography

  Schwern has a copy of Perl 6, he lets Larry Wall borrow it and take notes.

  Schwern once sneezed into a microphone and the text-to-speech conversion was a regex that turns crap into gold.

  Damian Conway and Schwern once had an arm wrestling contest. The superposition still hasn’t collapsed.

  Schwern was the keynote speaker at the first YAPC::Mars.

  When Schwern runs a smoke test, the fire department is notified.

  Dan Brown analyzed a JAPH Schwern wrote and discovered it contained the Bible.

  Schwern writes Perl code that writes Makefiles that write shell scripts on VMS.

  Schwern does not commit to master, master commits to Schwern.

  SETI broadcast some of Schwern’s Perl code into space. 8 years later they got a reply thanking them for the improved hyper drive plans.

  Schwern once accidentally typed “git pull —hard” and dragged Github’s server room 10 miles.

  There are no free namespaces on CPAN, there are just modules Schwern has not written yet.

  Schwern’s tears are said to cure cancer, unfortunately his Perl code gives it right back.

  Sessions

  • * Is the Web Down: a Practical Tutorial on How the Web Works
    • Title: Is the Web Down: a Practical Tutorial on How the Web Works
    • Track: Chemistry
    • Room: Marquam
    • Time: 1:45 – 2:30pm
    • Excerpt:

      You click on a link and you can’t get to your favorite web site. Now what? Is the web site down? Is it your connection? Is it something in between? How can you figure out what’s wrong if you don’t know how it works? We’ll show you everything that happens after you click a link so next time the web site is down you’ll know what to do to fix it.

    • Speakers: Michael Schwern, Joshua Keroes

• Chromatic X

  Onyx Neon Inc.
  • Website: http://www.onyxneon.com/
  • Blog: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/
  • Twitter: chromatic_x
  • Identi.ca: chromatic

  Biography

  Chromatic has over a decade of experience contributing to free and open source software projects. He’s contributed to Perl 1, Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot. You may recognize him from myriad books, including Modern Perl.

  He is the publisher of Onyx Neon Press, which produces great books about software, technology, and modern living.

  He is also an entrepreneur involved in several projects, including Club Compy, a browser-based retro programming environment designed to introduce children of all ages to the joy of creating new things with computers.

  Sessions

  • * Project Management Should be Boring!
    • Title: Project Management Should be Boring!
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: Marquam
    • Time: 3:50 – 4:35pm
    • Excerpt:

      Many people see project management as the art of trying to please everyone and pleasing no one, while trying not to go too far over deadline and too far over budget. It doesn’t have to be that way. Good project management can be so predictable and reliable that it’s almost boring. Here’s what works in real projects.

    • Speakers: Chromatic X
  • * Introduction to Parrot
    • Title: Introduction to Parrot
    • Track: Hacks
    • Room: Morrison
    • Time: 10:00 – 10:45am
    • Excerpt:

      This talk briefly explains the overall architecture of Parrot and teaches the skills needed to get started hacking in Parrot.

    • Speakers: Chromatic X