I asked him whether there were many ruby
programmers in Japan, because Matsumoto is
Japanese. This was ambiguously a question about
either the number of ruby programmers in Japan,
or the nationalism of Japanese programmers.
He answered yes, and added, perl is for cool
uses, while php is for dummies, java is for
companies, and ruby is ... for hackers.
At the conference he presented a number of web
and blog hacks, some from his O'Reilly book, Blog
Hacks, at present only available in Japanese.
But the ruby connection was in the first
presentation. Apparently the source code search
engine gonzui supported searching php, ruby and
python code, but not perl, I guess because the
only thing that parses perl is perl.
He used PPI to parse perl, but still had to hack
parsing of method calls for example, by
look-behind matching on '->'.
Integrating it into gonzui, a ruby program,
required him to write his first code in ruby
apparently.
http://bulknews.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/cpan_code_searc.html
His talk gave me the warm fuzzies. It's always
good to see East Asians kick ass in the
international arena. This was apparently his
first perl presentation outside Japan. I imagine
he must get practice presenting in English at
Moveable Type, however.
Dan Kogai doesn't act like a Japanese, but
Miyagawa did.
mjd last year in Taipei contrasted the East Asian
style of presentation and audience participation
with the Israeli type, where a successful
presentation is measured by how many in the
audience speak up to attack what you said.
At the conference, Miyagawa announce YAPC::Asia
to be arranged by the Sibuya Perlmongers in
Tokyo.
I hope they make it at least a 2-country tour so
the programmers coming from the US and elsewhere
can first come to Taipei for one weekend and then
go to Tokyo for the next.
Participants in the Tamsui Hackathon here were
in-country for almost a week and next year,
perhaps they can come back to Taiwan for 3-4 days
and then go to Japan for 3-4 days.
