yesthattom | OSCON2004: Tuesday

Morning: I attended Embracing and Extending RT taught by Jesse Vincent and Robert Spier. They explained the internals that one would need to know to modify RT. Luckily in 3.x just about everything can be modified without having to touch their source code. This makes upgrading a lot easier.

Lunch: Had lunch with Jesse and a number of his friends at this really bad restaurant. Nothing to mention here.

Afternoon: I attended Mark-Jason Dominus’s Tricks of the Wizards tutorial on Perl. I finally learned how globs work. From there, he went onto a number of things like aliases and filters and other topics that I never really understood. He’s also just a fabulous speaker, always entertaining, and handles the students really well.

Dinner: just a bite at the bar. I ran into the O’Reilly “local perl groups” party and hung out with them. I ended up agreeing to write an article for their online newsletter.

Evening: The evening talks were fantastic.

First was Larry Wall’s state of the onion. He used a series of screen-savers as a vehicle for talking about the state of Perl’s development.

The middle talk was (missed his name) and it was this amazing discussion of software development culture and the role of the hacker (old term for hacker... an uber-programmer not the new evil “hacker” term). One thing that I learned explained why my previous company’s development team worked so well, and how we can fix some of the problems we see at my current place.

The last talk was Damian Conway who did this amazing talk about Life (the Game of Life algorithm), The Universe (physics) and Everything (literally... but mostly the Klingon language). He showed this amazing merger of GOL and quantum physics that permitted grid points to contain 2 values, and it turns out to be an excellent demo of the laws of thermodynamics... and even proved one of the mysteries that too physicists centuries to prove. He then walked us through a number of Perl6 features and related them to the Klingon language. In fact, he made a Perl filter that let you write perl code in Klingon and showed his GOL program completely written in Klingon. It was an amazing demo.

Then I went to my room and watched them replay the DNC convention for the west-coast.