I returned from the conference with >250 email messages to answer. I have it down now to nearly 120, and it should be back to normal (20-50) by next week.
Many thanks to everyone who said kind words about Open Source Convention. I can only take credit for the content, though. The smooth running, family-friendly atmosphere, and other good conference stuff was all out of my hands. You can all take credit for the great community vibe, though--it was truly a week of Perl love.
And on Monday the O'Reilly editor-in-chief, Frank Willison, died of a heart attack. It surprised us all, and we've gotten little work done this week while we try to work out what life without Frank will be like. He was one of the few really good people you meet in a lifetime--smart, compassionate, and with a wicked sense of humour that he didn't use to bring others down. We're missing him already. If you want to see why we're missing him, read some of his zingers and imagine him as your boss.
I'm trying to write up my report of the conference, but it keeps being pre-empted by travel plans to the funeral, book stuff that I neglected during OScon, and so on. It will happen, though, I promise!
And then there was the python-dev discussion about Perl and Python sharing a common runtime. That was very interesting, but took a lot of time to keep up with. The current plan is for Dan to look at Python's needs with a single person from python-dev, and once we've got some running code and design docs that talk about how Python's semantics would work on the VM, we'll go back to python-dev.
Frankly, I think it'll happen whether the Python folks play an active role in it or not. It'll just be easier if the people who already know the tricks of implementing Python share them with us :-)
Ok, time for me to get back to work. Best wishes to the lucky folks in Amsterdam for YAPC::Europe. Party on!
--Nat
