LPW2008, Functional Pe(a)rls talk

osfameron on 2008-12-01T09:31:23

(Cross-posted from http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/12/01/functional-pearls-v2-now-with-monads-at-the-london-perl-workshop-2008/)

On Saturday I gave an updated version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk. This time around I cut the whistlestop tour of builtin FP techniques in Perl (map/grep/join) and added a section on Monads - what they are and how to implement them. I'd originally worried that the slides might have been over-academic and hard to understand, but luckily Dave Cantrell had presented closures that morning, and lots of people had spoken about the cool and evil things you can do with Devel::Declare. Also the Monad talk did handwave over some minor details (like munit/join :-) and it helped to play a little for laughs - I should probably subtitle the talk

"Imperative programming... in Pure Perl!"

I think the talk went down well and I also won a book (of maps of Old London Town) from the nice people at Nestoria for "Best Topic", which I guess means I can refer to it as an "award-winning" talk.

I've uploaded the slides of my award-winning talk on functional programming in Perl to slideshare ;-)

The conference

Mark Keating, the Shadowcat team, all the volunteers, sponsors, and Josette's O'Reilly bookstall, and of course the speakers, delivered a fantastic event which was not only free, but even had free beer! (Courtesy of Venda and Shadowcat, we drank the pub out of Witchfinder ale within 30 minutes, but the free booze was flowing till around 10pm, which was incredibly generous and appreciated -- less so the following morning).

It was great to see some quality talks, a uniformly excellent lineup of lightning talks (including one which broached Italy's candidacy for YAPC::EU::2010), meet up with old friends and colleagues, and put some more names to nicks and faces.