[email protected] wrote:
The first part was very fun, the second was computer language porn -
several of the non-compiler crowd ran on that :)
Lots of people, the hall was half full.
I attended the MIT presentation. I didn't notice many Boston.pm-ers
there, aside from Uri, of course, who made a call for MIT faculty and
staff to talk to him about YAPC (I don't think he got any takers,
unfortunately; maybe we should have distributed fliers to the crowd or
something?) I think long time Boston.pm lurker Aaron Sherman introduced
himself to Uri after the talk.
I'd estimate the hall was about 3/4 full, with 120 ~ 150 people. The
talk with QA ran almost 2 hours, with only a few people leaving before
the first hour was up. Quite a few left by 6 PM.
Not surprisingly it sounds like the talk followed the same format as the
Harvard talk, with the first half being some historical background
leading to Perl done with lots of humor, and the second half talking
about Perl 6 specifics.
Some of the things covered in the first part included some
justifications for the syntax of Perl in comparison to other languages,
and how it fits with the model of natural languages and the way we learn
them. (Made me feel better about the "line noise" criticism often lobed
at Perl.) He also explained that the "more than one way to do things"
attribute was beneficial in learning the language, permitting a novice
dialect in addition to an advanced user's dialect.
The second part of the talk was less unique and covered a bunch of stuff
we've seen at prior Boston.pm talks on Perl 6. A few things were new (to
me), such as the features to facilitate parallel processing.
Perhaps the most significant point made in the latter half was the
degree to which they've designed Perl 6 to be extensible, such that the
extensions are "first class" members of the lexicon and not hacked on
with syntax that is inconsistent with the built-in functions.
Larry made a request for people to download and test the current Perl 6
prototypes. (Someone chime in with a link, if you have it handy.)
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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