Another TPC down, more brain cells pack with Perly goodness. The Perl lightning talks were unusually good this year. From Gnat's naming some of the unsing hero's of Perl, to the Perl Tk app that helps a handicapped woman speak to the Manager turned accidental Perl programmer to Damian's call for net civility, Gilbert and Sullivan style: all the talks were a delight to hear. I have to say, even with all the writing and work I've done with XML-RPC, I feel like I've got a very long way to go. Maybe in this next year, I can find away to give back more substantially to the community. I'm going to make a serious effort to follow along with the Perl 6 internals. Dan is a great guy and also a native Bostonian. He and I had a one on one conversation about some of the design goals of the Perl VM. I haven't done programming like this in years. I've been writing such high level code for so long, it would be very healthy to dive down into the low-level stuff again. I can't understand where Torkington found the energy/time to father another child. I don't know how Damian, in a confused, sleep-deprived stupor, can STILL create innovative and fun Perl modules. I often wonder if I've become too focused on Software Engineering and lost the fun of coding.
I sat in on Pudge's slash talk. That's the sort of coding I wish I was doing: futzing with mod_perl and Apache to create a tighly integrated web application platform. Maybe someday. I still need to talk to Ken MacLeod about Frontier::RPC2. (note to self: try email). Maybe the modules of Randy Ray, Paul Kulchenko and Ken can be rolled into one. Perl needs just one solid XML-RPC lib. Seems simple enough to do.
I'm not going to say much about Mundie's talk, accept to say that it was squarely directed at the Press, not hackers. Tiemann's speech was aimed at the home crowd. You'd think the crowd, all experienced Usenet readers, would spot a troll a mile away. This is unso.
