On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Peter Haworth
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:34:46 +0000, Lyle wrote:
>> I don't take a lot of notes. Everything (I think) was recorded so you'll
>> be able to watch the bits that interest you.
>
> I take a few more notes than Lyle, so here are my impressions:
>
> I had to get up at 5:45, to catch the 6:30 train. Despite the freezing
> weather, there were still revellers hanging around a couple of the clubs
> I passed on my way to the station, who had presumably been partying all
> through the night. I can only admire their stamina, regardless of its
> foolhardy application.
>
> The trip to the venue was pretty uneventful, other than my surprise and
> disgust at the cost of a Zone 1 single fare. Four quid for a 15 minute
> journey! However, as soon as I got there, I was obliged to carry an
The reason it's so expensive is to encourage you to get an Oyster
card, which you can do anonymously now. It's a 3quid deposit, and
gives you 1.50 Zone 1 fares, and they auto-convert your day's spending
into the nearest minimum travel card fare if you take several
journeys. I don't think there's any advantage to using paper tickets
any more, at all.
Thanks for this summary - some useful pointers to which talks to pay
extra attention to (and not...).
P
> incredibly heavy box of books up to the O'Reilly stand. I was a bit
> confused that all of Josie's boxes had Wiley's branding rather than
> O'Reilly's, despite their contents. What's the relationship there?
>
> After a bit of random milling about, everyone headed into the main lecture
> hall for Mark Keating's introduction to the workshop, after which was
> Dave Cross's very entertaining history of London.pm. I especially liked
> the fact that this talk included a mention of the outrage caused in some
> parts of the community by the "Perl is my bitch" T-shirts, yet ended
> with the famous photo of Graeg McCarroll and the camel, underlined by
> Dave's final words: "We f*ck camels!"
>
> Leon Brocard gave a quick run down of 10 of his modules that he hasn't
> already talked about. My favourites were:
> * App::Cache, which caches arbitrary perl data structures for a set
> amount of time. Useful if you don't care about the size of the cache,
> and has a handy convenience method for transparently caching web pages
> * HTML::Fraction, converts strings like "1/5" into character references
> like "⅕", as used in Leon's recipe database
> * Image::WorldMap, plots points on a world map image, with optional
> labels which don't overlap, as used by the Perl monger World Map
> * Term::ProgressBar::Simple, displays a progress bar controlled by a
> simple tied variable
>
> David Cantrell tried to convince the masses that closures are actually
> simple, and extremely useful. His view is that they are basically
> code with data attached; the inverse of objects, which are data with
> code attached. He also made a good analogy between the class/object
> distinction and the sub/closure distinction. Unfortunately, the example
> from CPU::Emulator::Z80 focussed too much on the details of z80 emulation,
> and not enough on the benefits gained by using closures. The other
> example from Sort::MultipleFields was more lucid, but a diagram would
> have been a big help to anyone who can't convert from unfamiliar code
> to data structures in their head.
>
> Adrian Witas was almost completely impenetrable when talking about
> Abstract::Meta::Class, which he was supposed to be presenting as an
> alternative to Moose, but didn't make that clear at all. In point of fact,
> he didn't make anything clear at all. AMC may indeed be the bee's knees,
> but Adrian failed to give any kind of rationale for its existence or
> its differences from Moose.
>
> Mike Whitaker did a good job of introducing Moose, showing a bunch of
> cool features. Moose seems to do an excellent job of removing boiler
> plate code, and turning class construction into the kind of declarative
> affair which other languages enjoy.
>
> Then I went to Matt Trout's talk on Acme::Yorkshire, which I was just
> expecting to be a surface-level explanation of a module which converted
> text to Yorkshire dialect, much like the Swedish Chef translator
> module which I can no longer find. Instead, it was a description of how
> Devel::Declare can be used to radically alter perl's syntax, enabling
> the creation of new control constructs such as:
> method($foo,@bar){
> # $self is available, and there's no need for a trailing semi
> }
> It took me a while to acclimatise to Matt's presentation style, in which
> the slides at first didn't appear to match up with what he was gleefully
> bellowing about, but this was a fascinating, funny and frightening talk.
>
> Due to the press of perl mongers in Subway at lunch time, I managed to
> get a free cookie, because the lone girl behind the counter couldn't
> spare the time to wait for me to find the correct change. That's the
> power of bulk buying!
>
> After lunch, I went to Andy Wardley's "Badger Power" talk, which still not
> having read any of the abstracts, I was was expecting to be about Template
> Toolkit. I've only briefly tried TT during an aborted rewrite of a major
> system at work, and would like to give it a better try at some point,
> so this seemed like it would be reasonably useful to me. However, Andy
> was actually talking about his new Badger lightweight foundation classes,
> which provide simple and consistent APIs for all manner of highly useful
> features: error handling, debugging, exporting, lazy loading, constant
> declarations, en/decoding, testing, file name and handle manipulation,
> and last but not least, class construction, which combines basically
> all of the above. This was a great presentation of what looks like an
> incredibly useful set of tools. Next time I need to create a new class,
> I'll probably use Badger.
>
> I caught the last few minutes of Abigail's character class talk, which
> overran not only his scheduled slot, but also the intersession break. The
> bit I saw reminded me that perl allows you to create your own reusable
> character classes, which could cut down some level of repeated code,
> but I'm not sure it's of major use to me at the moment.
>
> Abigail's overrun meant that Joel Berstein's interesting talk about
> XML::Pastor was seriously rushed. Pastor looks like a nifty way of mapping
> simply between perl classes and XML Schema. It's basically ORM for XML,
> which could be really useful for me, except that most of the XML I handle
> at work uses DTDs rather than schemata.
>
> Then I had the misfortune to attend another talk given by Adrian Witas.
> This one was about ORM, specifically Persistent::Entity. Adrian again
> failed to give any indication of the benefits of this module over the
> alternatives. I considered escaping to Tim Bunce's profiling talk about
> Devel::NYTProf, but I'd already asked a question, and there was only
> about three other people in the room, so that didn't seem very polite. I
> should have had the courage of my convictions, as Tim's talk was voted
> one of the best in show.
>
> Never mind, osfameron's talk on functional programming was another
> instance of Devel::Declare to the rescue, giving perl native-looking
> currying, monads, list comprehension and pattern matching (of function
> arguments to multiply defined subroutines, not of strings to regexen),
> or as osfameron put it, "combining general perl evil with the goodness
> of haskell". Like the Acme::Yorkshire talk, this illicited gasps, moans
> and laughter from the audience, and I for one can't wait for Acme::Monad
> to be released.
>
> Then it was the lightning talks, which were all good, for a variety of
> reasons:
> Action Aid presented a video showing how the money from the raffle would
> be spent.
> Leo Lapworth presented his 20-minute "DBIx::Class for (advanced)
> beginners" talk in only five minutes, but still managed to make sense,
> and teach me something new.
> Someone whose name I forget presented TAP::Formatter::HTML, build on
> top of TAP::Parser, which produces a fancy HTML page from the output
> of a perl test. This is a simple overview with drill-down capability,
> making it easy to save and interpret your test results.
> David Leadbeater presented his work on Wikipedia summaries, which enable
> searching Wikipedia via a variety of interfaces. Of special interest
> was the DNS query method: host -t txt perl.wp.dg.cx
> Edmund von der Burg showed his scarily short Sudoku solver (3 lines of
> less than 80 characters), and expounded on the virtues of perl golf:
> thinking about problems in a different way, and understanding exactly
> what every part of your code is doing.
> Paul Makepeace gave some details of what investor-dynamics.com does,
> and invited job applications.
> Matt Trout loudly disputed the view which he thinks most people have; that
> they aren't good enough to contribute to the community. Everyone should
> write reuseable code and post it on CPAN. Failing that, submit patches
> to module authors. Failing that, submit tests, so they can at least see
> what the bug is, and know when they've fixed it. Or while you're still
> learning how to use a module, write up your experiences as documentation,
> since you know what problems you're facing, which the author has probably
> forgotten about.
>
> Finally, the raffle. The winner of the iPod donated it to Mark Keating,
> who as organiser wasn't allowed to participate. Mark promptly auctioned
> it off to raise another GBP107.01 for Action Aid.
>
> Just before heading off to the pub, Greg McCarroll handed over the reins
> of London.pm to Leon Brocard. The pub was reserved in its entirety for
> workshop attendees, and the food and drink was all paid for by sponsors of
> the event, though the room was a bit too packed for even distribution of
> comestibles. Nevertheless, this was a great opportunity to match faces
> to names, and I had some interesting conversation with Tim Bunce and
> Paul Makepeace.
>
> Lyle and I left relatively early, in case of bad traffic. It took overly
> long to crawl out of London, and we were beset by roadworks and a patch
> of incredibly thick fog on the motorway. Even so, we got back to Bristol
> before midnight, which I hadn't expected at the start of the day.
>
> All in all, a great day out. I'm looking forward to next year.
>
> --
> Peter Haworth [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Birds naturally prefer early binding to late binding; worms will
> naturally disagree. Rolling stones gather no type constraints."
> -- Larry Wall
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