Gosh, I've been a bit slack at updating this journal, haven't I? Well, I'm in sunny San Diego for OSCON. The first two days were tutorials, which I mostly didn't take part in as gnat has roped me in to a super sekrit project, which involves video. Video is the future! Hard drive manufacturers are going to make millions! etc. etc.
I've mostly hung out talking to Perl people, participating in improptu talks about jabber, perl, parrot, opcodes, beer, the crap service at the hotel bar, xml, yaml, aml, object patterns in Perl, sekrit projects and so on. Oh, and I've finally gotten used to the jet lag.
Yesterday, Larry presented "The State of the Onion", where he gets to say whatever he wants about the state of Perl. I think we've got it on video (and we may mp3 it) but here are a couple of things he said. We probably could have got Perl 6 out already, but it would have been crap. In ecosystems you have to have a niche and you can't keep that niche until your environment is ready for it. Perl 5 is still around because we have removed the fear from our FUD. We're used to UD, but the F causes us to be crazy. Oh, and now we're all friendly and don't mind other languages possibly running on Parrot. This is a big shift from the Perl community two years ago.
The London.pm team didn't do very well at the Internet Quiz Show last night. It took us a long time to get up to speed, we answered some good questions, but failed to get into the final. Oh well, at least we didn't promise our body to be plasticised...
Today the conference starts proper. Lawrence Lessig has just given a really great keynote, the best quote being "How many of you have donated money to the EFF?" and following "How many of you have donated more money to the EFF than your crappy DSL provider?". He made a lot of good points and is a great speaker. His books are good too.
Richard Stallman is up now. He's rehashing all his old arguments and with any luck he'll dress up as Saint Ignucious and sing on stage...
