So we had a london.pm meeting last night and much fun was had by all. Many thanks to Reading Room for giving us a room to hold it in.
We started with Paul Mison giving a short talk on how easy it is to integrate RSS data feeds into infobots. Then Michael Stevens gave a brief introduction to his Mail::ListDetector module which works in conjunction with Mail::Audit to filter mail into the relevant mailboxes. This was of particular interest as most of london.pm seem to be on too many mailing lists. Michael was then joined by Richard Clamp and they talked about their Pod::Coverage module, which parses your POD and ensures that you've documented all the functions in the code. The first half closed with Richard and Mark Fowler giving a reprise of their Wax::On Wax::Off talk that went down so well at YAPC::Europe. For those who don't know, this talk is about methods of teaching Perl that draw on metaphors from Kung Fu movies.
We then had a short break and waited for Simon Cozens to arrive. He was supposed to be talking about Parrot, but when he turned up he told me that he also had something else to tell us about.
The second half opened with Simon's Parrot talk. This certainly grabbed many people's attention and I guess it's why why had twice as many people at the meeting than we usually do. After Simon, Leon Brocard gave a short talk on how he's working on mapping the Java Virtual Machine onto the Parrot Virtual Machine (or Parrot Virtual Computer as we must now call it because of the abbreviation!)
Then Simon gave his second talk of the evening. As editor of perl.com he'd just received Larry's third Apocalyspe which will be published next week. This Apocalypse covered operators and Simon went through as much of it as he could in 20 minutes. There was stuff we already expected and stuff that we certainly didn't expect ('_' is the concaternation operator). I think my favourite is the '//' operator which is like '||' but checks definedness rather than truth. I can already see uses for '//=' instead of $x = defined $x ? $x : $y. Oh, and that reminds me, the ternay operator becomes COND ?? EXPR :: EXPR. There's loads more, but you'll be able to read it all next week. See - you should have come to the meeting.
And then off to Won Kei's with various Perl 5 Porters for and incredibly cheap meal and intelligent discussion about the other forthcoming apocalyse.
