Woo! The content is settled but the last-minute changes, and I think registration is about to open for the Open Source Convention (which includes The Perl Conference, The PHP Conference, the Tcl/Tk Conference, and a bunch of others).
With over 200 talks, 60 tutorials, and 17 rooms, this
represents a considerable scaling up from previous
conferences. Oh, did I mention we're now five
days long, not four? And in San Diego? On the beach?
This all might go some way to explaining why I'm balder
and more ulcerous than I was three months ago :-) This
is the first year I've tried to plan the entire Open
Source Convention, and it was a major undertaking.
You're probably chomping at the bit for TPC information.
Well, we have two days of Mark-Jason Dominus tutorials,
two days of Damian Conway, and a bunch of interesting
stuff from people we haven't had before: a tutorial on
the Perl5 internals by Simon Cozens, Inline.pm by Brian
Ingerson, LWP by Sean Burke, and POE by Rocco Caputo.
Full details of the sessions and tutorials will be
available here once registration opens (RSN, they tell me).
In order to tease you into ever-higher ecstasies of
Perlacious pleasure, I'll be talking about some of the
talks and tutorials, why I wanted to have them as
part of the Perl Conference, and thus why you'll want to
bludgeon your boss with a copy of "Java in a Nutshell"
until they let you go :-)
First is definitely Simon's internals tutorial. I've
known for a while that Simon was someone I really wanted
to have present at TPC. It took some doing, though, what
with Japan and studies and all those other pesky Real World
things. Finally, though, he's here.
You might know Simon from his p5p and perl6
mailing list summaries. But most of you probably don't
know of his safaris deep into the core of Perl.
It was because of his part in the major effort to finish
Perl's Unicode implementation that he's giving a tutorial on Unicode in
Perl. But to do that hacking, he had to know a lot
about the internals of Perl.
Parallel to his hacking, I'd been dreaming of an
internals class. One of the major ways that Perl
will continue to live and grow is by having a surfeit of
people who know how to do stuff to it. In the past we've
had people learn, master, and then move on from the
internals. The number of people learning seems to have
dropped off lately, though, and an internals class seemed
to me to be a good way to fix this.
Of course, the Internals class has considerable "slow-motion
road accident" attraction, too. The Perl internals are
some of the most wacky and interesting uses of C you'll
ever see, and "I've always wanted to know what goes on
under the hood" is just as good a reason for the tutorial
as "I want to hack Perl to add a ||| operator".
This tutorial, like most, is three hours. Expect a
wild ride at breakneck pace through the caverns and
crevasses of Perl. PEER over the edge to see the tangled
bits below! REEL back in horror as the tentacles of
the RE engine threaten to engulf you! BEG for mercy as
magic is explained!
If your roadmap to the Perl source tree features the words
"here be dragons", Simon's the guy riding up on the white
horse and carrying a big sharp piece of pointy metal.
So now you know ... I only wrote this journal entry so I
could leave you with that image :-)
Nat
