The first day of regular sessions at yapc 19100 began with Larry Wall, who gave a bit of a different kind of talk (even for him). He started talking about our notions of up and down and what is progress may be relative, which then carried us to a discussion of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , an early 17th c. allegory of a man named Chrisitian and his journey to the Celestial City, who on the way encounters all sorts of people and situations, both good and bad, to help and hinder his journey.
Wall noted that this book, which he read as a child, had a significant impact on his life, and likely on Perl itself. He then progressed to read passages from the book and draw comparisons to Christian's journey and the journey of a Perl programmer.
Wall also noted that he, et al, have been working like dogs for the past six months on the Programming Perl, Third Edition (a.k.a. Camel 3).
I attended some very interesting sessions on XML and WAP and perl 5.6 and MacPerl, and the day was going well, until I, with about everyone else, went to see Damian Conway's talk on Quantum Superposition and the First Virtue. I won't even attempt to explain it aside from noting that it mixed physics with Perl and nary a soul there seemed to recall a talk on quantum mechanics being so universally appreciated and enjoyed.
We wandered upstairs for food and drink and contest announcements. Leader of New York Perl Mongers David Adler won the Perl Mongers raffle for a new VA Linux computer.
The deadline for the Perl Power Contest from ActiveState has been extended to Perl Conference 4.0, where the winner will be announced, and first prize will be airfare to yapc Europe.
Then we played a trivia game, with 30 questions spread over 3 rounds, one point per question, and one round could be worth double the points. Each table was a team, and the winning team got 29 of 30 questions right, for a total of 38 points. Three teams tied for 36. Some teams were handicapped, as any and all resources were allowed to the teams, and some teams had laptops with WaveLAN cards at their disposal. Beating the competition through technological superiority is a Good Thing, as Martha Stewart's computer literate progeny might say.
This book was popular in schools when I was at school, although I cannot remember much about it now.
But perhaps it was popular with my schools because I went to school in the village where Bunyan was born, Elstow, and then later attended a school named after him.
