This is a shortened version of my mail to Perl events mailing list.
The Devconf 2010 conference is over and here are some after-thoughts of mine.
Unfortunately we didn't manage to set up a booth as Gabor Szabo suggested. First, it would cost us money (venue requirement) to display things or even organize some desks with chairs, second ââ¬â most of the perl activists were already involved either as speakers or as orgs. The schedule was rather tight but I think the booth would still be effective. Ok, next time.
We had a nice track with several advocacy and several technical talks. Although Piers Cawley cancelled his talk several days before the conference, Carl Masak did a cool tardis/sigmung talk in the big hall (all the other talks were in smaller hall dedicated to Perl track).
I was unpleasantly surprised by outright hostility towards Perl from Ruby guys both in their talks and informally. I think that they are both wrong and right. First, modern Perl got closer to Ruby, second ââ¬â we still hear offensive jokes and remarks about Ruby during YAPC conferences so we probably deserve some retaliation.
The Python track attracted the most people of all, I think. The PHP track was also crowded and there were many down-to-earth talks for newbies. They were cool. ASP.NET track was almost empty. Ruby track had a lot of interesting talks and they even managed to organize their own lightning talks session (of two talks :)). The most interesting for me was the talk about Rubinius by one of its committers ââ¬â a (kinda) successful project to implement Ruby compiler in Ruby. What impressed me most is the courage Ruby people attack such tasks with. They already have around 10 different implementations of Ruby while we still repeat the mantra that only perl can parse Perl. Alas, I am not that fluent in Ruby to know if it is really so much simpler as a language than Perl 5.
One thing I noted is that there are a lot of "highload" projects implemented in Perl but no in Ruby (I mean locally). This means that Perl people tend to talk about performance, event loops, problems of serving thousands of requests and optimizing server farms. Such talks are not very interesting to a casual application developer. They are too high in the sky. Ruby people talked about simple things and that appealed to more developers.
The most successful Perl talk was Anatoly Sharifulin's on Mojolicious (in Russian). It's very refined, energetic and motivating. Lots of people said that they were pleasantly surprised with features and expressed their wish to come home and remember some Perl-fu for the sake of trying Mojolicious. This is very cool. My own talk (in Russian) based on brilliant Tim Bunce's "Perl Myths" was also very popular. Lots of non-perl people do not know what a gem CPAN is, how huge and at the same time fresh and growing it is. We try to continue discussions on FriendFeed, twitter, LiveJournal and blogs right now.
All the talks we had on our track are listed here.
