Last night I dreamt about Perl. Unable to get the perfect parking spot, I wander into a coffee shop. This coffee shop has a projector and room for lots of chairs.
Lo and behold Nat Torkington is giving a talk on something. Actually, he's not talking. Every word is written on the slide, and he's just slowly clicking through the slides as most of the audience is deeply engrossed in whatever he's written about. I don't remember what it was.
After Nat has finished, a very attractive woman gets up to give a talk. Instead of using the projector, she uses chalk and a blackboard which is suddenly available. At one point in her talk, she brings up a "poison hash" that looked like this:
(a,1,b,2,c,3) = &$%some_hash;
I'm not sure what makes this hash "poisoned" - the fact that it has non-sensical syntax, the three sigils in a row or the fact that it's on the right side of an assignment statement. I never found out.
I did find out that the attractive teacher had a boyfriend who plays for the New York Giants and *just happened* to be a Perl programmer.
Dammit! I can't even score in my own dreams!
--Nat
