Let us dispense immediately with the quest for objectivity and state that this Perl News scribe thinks that Perl Conference 3.0 was the better of the three O'Reilly affairs thus far. The quality of sessions was increased over the others, with more good stuff for all manner of programmers. So, what happened at this Monterey get-together?
Larry Wall enlightened and entertained with the Third State of the Onion speech,
this time an exploration of chemistry and molecules and atoms and fun things
that Wall did in a previous life as a chemistry student. It was YA post-modern
(as Wall defines post-modern
The two main keynotes for the combined conferences were given by Guy Kawasaki (formerly of Apple Computer, currently of garage.com), and Bill Joy (of Sun). Kawasaki drew from some of his themes in his book Rules for Revolutionaries, encouraging hackers and developers to be looking ahead to the next curve, the next Big Thing. He went against much of the conventional wisdom and told developers to ship "crappy," bug-riddled code, and fix it in the next release, as long as it is revolutionary, and went on to answer questions as "How do I know if my project is revolutionary, even if it's crappy?"
Joy discussed the history of Unix, C, BSD, and open source software, explaining how Sun has arrived at its controversial Sun Community Source License, which differs from Open Source licensing in two key ways: compatibility among deployed versions is required and enforced through testing, and proprietary modifications and extensions are allowed. According to Joy, Sun is moving all of its intellectual property to this style of licensing, including both hardware and software.
Ted Nelson, originator of the term "hypertext", released his long-awaited Xanadu system. But it has little to do with Perl, so we move on.
The Perl Mongers and O'Reilly sponsored the White Camel awards, given to individuals who gave outstanding nontechnical contributions to the Perl community. Tom Christiansen was granted the Perl Advocacy Award for his contributions in Perl evangelism and documentation. Kevin Lenzo won the Perl Community Award for his work in starting up and running the first annual Yet Another Perl Conference (yapc), a low-cost conference for Perl users. Adam Turoff won the Perl User Group Award for his work in starting up and providing assistance to Perl Mongers. Each recipient was awarded a big check for $3000, which presumably are accompanied by smaller checks for $3000 that can easily be taken to a bank for exchange into legal tender.
O'Reilly also gave out its annual Perl Conference awards. Peter J. Braam, Michael Callahan, and Phil Schwan won for their paper on The InterMezzo Filesystem, a distributed filesystem written in Perl. Uri Guttman and Larry Rosler won for A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting, which discussed techniques of using packed records to do a single comparison rather than doing several comparisons as is common in the map/sort/map technique. Gary Spivey won an award for MEADE (A Modular, Extensible, Adaptable Design Environment for ASIC and FPGA Development).
In the special awards, Rocco Caputo won the Best Module award for his POE (which is basically an OS written in Perl), and Damian Conway (who won twice last year) won the Most Useful award for Coy, a system for printing error messages in haiku.
We'll have more to add over the next few days, including links and news and notes about other awards handed out.
