Robert Blackwell writes Please join the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers for a special meeting with Damian Conway on Saturday 29th October. See http://pgh.pm.org/ for further details. Hope to see you there.
Location:
CMU
Wean Hall Room 7500
Pittsburgh, PA
Driving directions
Campus directions
Saturday, October 29, 2005, 18:30
Sufficiently Advanced Technologies - Damian Conway
In module design, interface is everything. Going one step beyond this dictum, Damian demonstrates and explains several practical applications of Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") by presenting a series of useful modules whose interface is...nothing.
Damian Conway holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known software modules including: Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin). All of this software is available free from your local CPAN mirror.
A well-known member of the international Perl community, Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", and author of the book "Object Oriented Perl". In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry's design decisions.
Other technical areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
Re:And Boston.PM too
cog on 2005-10-27T11:39:29
If you can stand the drive, you can hit two Damian[...]s in one week.
It's amazing what your mind can hide from you when you're reading real fast...
