Hi guys, Well, reading the previous emails, I feel we all agree on the baseline.
My first email may have sounded like I suggested to make NPW into a kind of dynamic language workshop and that was not my intention. NPW 2008 should and will be a workshop with similar content and spirit as the previous editions. No revolution intended there. What I meant was really just a theme: trying to gather speakers and talks in order to bring the spotlights toward the *dynamic* aspect of Perl, and use that to attract the interest of the academia (and get their help ;). We have the chance of having contacts with world class hackers who are designing virtual machines and new languages (perl6). That is exciting enough for us perl developers, but that would be highly exciting even to folk that are not specifically specialized in perl: students wanting to get a first hand insight in how an open source community gets things done, and academics wanting to get in touch with real life language implementers. Furthermore, as Salve mentioned earlier, the kind of developers who attend a workshop are almost per definition the kind of self-motivated people who wouldn't be scared but rather excited at the perspective of a workshop exploring the dynamic aspects of a language. What I suggest for this workshop is to just do the usual, gathering and accepting talks as usual, but trying to send a clear message that we would appreciate talks about perl6, parrot and dynamic aspects of perl5. I don't think it would be hard to gather enough material to hold 1 dynamic track over 1 day, eventually more. And the overall content of the workshop would be still Perl focused. As an example, I am pretty sure any of us could get together at least one talk about things like runtime code generation, class hierarchy hacking/mixins, duck typing, and so on. These are things most of us use, and I think it would make for good talks... On the side of that, if we could get 1 or 2 talks from Tobias or others about dynamic features that are not perl specific but can be a source of inspiration to developers using perl, I would find it really exciting, and so would many others I think. How could we do that? By getting in touch with the right people, a long time in advance. Meaning contacting Perl6 and parrot developers and convincing them to come (eventually subventioning them? If we get a cheap venue...) The carrot for them would be that they would get academics to share ideas with, which as I witnessed when watching Jonathan, Tobias and Johan talk last week tends to be pretty exciting for both parts: they really have much to exchange! Jonathan W. has already expressed his support. If we could get a couple of stars along quite early and advertise it, that should do the magic. What do you think? /Erwan
