The second day of the German Perl Workshop was wonderful. People didn't only learn one language today (Perl 6), they also learnt assembler!
The morning started with Damian giving a talk on Perl 6. It wasn't the usual talk describing the new, scary features of Perl 6. Instead, he converted Perl 5 programs to Perl 6 to show us how little the language really has changed. He also translated the programs idiomatically using the new features. It was great, and the new programs were simpler and easier to understand. Hopefully it reassured everyone that Perl will stay Perl.
davorg then gave his "Idiotic Perl" talk, describing the people outside the Perl community who program Perl badly, and how to bring them in and educate them and improve their programming. Perl is for CGI, right? ;-)
Gerald Richter talked about Embperl 2.0 (yes, a templating module) which looks like it has grown up a lot since I last saw it. He walked through the new Embperl website, how he used the new built-in DOM to parse different files and EmbperlObjects to tie it all together.
And then it was my turn! I gave my Inside Parrot talk, where I explained where Parrot was coming from (nicely following on from Damian's talk), where is was now and where it was going. I did a live demonstration of producing the Mandlebrot set and a game of life (no, not that Conway). I got some great questions, but everyone seemed to want it to be finished already. Hey, we're working on it...
Nick Clark talked about how Perl 5 copes with long numbers (making them fast as well as correct). He held up long numbers and scared us. Mark Lehmann also scared us, talking about how his Coro module worked, and then Mark Overmeer explained how Mail::Box comes together. Mail::Box is the new design for the mess of Mail:: modules and looks like it provides great mail functionality. All we need to do it hack it to support IMAP and then write another mail client in Perl...
DJ and I headed off home, missing the BOFs and talked about messaging plasma, web services, specifications and much more.
Yes another good day.
PS "A Perfect Storm" has a storm in it and is based on Star Wars
