Hi all! This is a report and some notes from the Haifa Perl Mongers meeting yesterday.
I arrived there by train from Tel Aviv with Sawyer, who was going to give the presentation about Moose. We met in the Arolozerov train station, and I was a little late since I noticed I had dressed too lightly for the cool weather. We bought tickets and went on the train to Haifa. On the way we talked about Perl, C, C#, bugs in CPAN modules, Chuck Norris facts, and other stuff. We arrived at Haifa well ahead of time, and I led the way to the meeting at Qualcomm. As it turned out, the road I took was relatively sub-optimal because there was a way with more pavements going there. But we got there. We entered Qualcomm, and saw Shmuel there and we were given tags for entrance (in exchange for our I.D. cards). We wanted to drink something and the cooler was broken, so we ended up using the tap. We waited for everyone else to arrive and in the meanwhile I munched on a croissant and a Rogalach. Then the presentations started. Erez gave a good presentation about how to talk to newbies, where he said that a lot of the things we say are irrelevant. Asking people to add "use strict" will cause their scripts to stop running completely whereas they previously only had a bug, so it's not always the best strategy. The old "RTFM" mantra or "You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!" were also mentioned. He then gave a few links where people can visit to help newcomers. He mentioned http://learn.perl.org/ but I was disappointed that he didn't mention http://perl-begin.org/ . Erez said that he believed that http://learn.perl.org/ was "a community site", but for a long time (many years) it went completely unmaintained and its source code was locked behind a firewall, and all this was depsite the fact that I offered my help in revamping it and free-of-charge. In all this time I maintained http://perl-begin.org/ and constantly improved it, and also made it available under the very permissive CC-by licence, and perl-begin's source code was made available in a publicly accessible Subversion repository. learn.perl.org has recently opened its version control system and accepted some contributors but progress on it has been slow. I wanted to do something with it in January, but was informed that "a plan is formed for learn.perl.org" and that I should wait until February. This in turn was delayed due to the DDoS attacks on irc.perl.org and meanwhile learn.perl.org remains without activity. So I would recommend people to use and link to http://perl-begin.org/ , but most people in the Perl community think that learn.perl.org is better for that due to its more official status. --------------- In any case, then Sawyer gave his presentation introducing Moose. It was a good presentation and the audience spent more time discussing it than last time he has given it in Tel Aviv. We spent a lot of time discussing the clearing methods which turned out to be equivalent to delete($self->{'myfield'}) or so. Then we discussed the compilation-time overhead of Moose where someone said it was unacceptable because it would mean his test suite composed of many scripts would run much slower. We then discussed about whether most people use all of the features in Moose, and whether it indicates code bloat and is worth the extra overhead. --------------- Then the meeting ended and we walked to the train station and returned home. Erez took the train with us and on the way home we discussed Java, Matt S. Trout and Planet Iron Man, Lambda Calculus, the earlier discussions about Moose and other stuff. I tried to explain to them about Lambda Calculus and not sure I was successful, but you can read what I had written about it here: http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/lc/ And what MJD wrote about it: http://perl.plover.com/lambda/ -------------- So it was a very nice meeting and I greatly enjoyed it. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ "The Human Hacking Field Guide" - http://shlom.in/hhfg Deletionists delete Wikipedia articles that they consider lame. Chuck Norris deletes deletionists whom he considers lame. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
