Yesterday afternoon brought mjd's Stolen Secrets of the Ivory Tower. Mcdonnell 162 was quite a bit busier for this talk than for Jos's POE talk earlier, despite the draw of Damien's Perl 6 talk which seemed to be the other choice, at least of #perl-ers.
Someone described the talk later as 'mjd tries to get functional programming taught without letting you know'. The first slide is fairly upfront about the aim, pointing out that most Perl programmers either learnt C first or learnt from people who did. After this he talked about solving Towers of Hanoi, seperating algorithms from presentation, recursion, callbacks and avoiding the pitfalls thereof, caching and Memoize, closures and iterators. I particularly liked the use of user parameters to make callback programming easier (the new scribot front end has to do nasty things to capture URI::Find's results, which could be avoided).
There were a couple of amusing digressions, including mjd finding a stick, and a rant on the superiority of the ISO date and paper size formats, but sadly there was a bit of bogging down in explaining closures so some of the later slides (handily presented in the bumper conference notes) weren't presented in time, which is a shame as I think I'd have gained from hearing them rather than reading them.
A bunch of folks headed up to the Loop (the only bit of St Louis I've seen far, except one, that seems to have nice shops and bars) for Thai food (with a bunch of people involved in either Parrot or Perl 6, it seems) before heading back to the BOFs, but I decided instead to have a quick drink before heading back to the dorms and collapsing (at which point people finally asked about the PIMB t-shirt I was wearing)., so hopefully (despite the early rising) I've almost got jetlag kicked. It was a shame to miss the TT BOF though. Ah well.
Now it's time to catch the bus, nearly.
