Notes from Yet Another Perl Conference:: North America, in Pittsburgh.

5:29 pm: The last session I was to attend was the least interesting (to me) of the day, and since it was standing room only, I bailed for the hotel. I was burnt anyhow. Good day though.

4:08 pm: It’s tempting to try and get mod_perl6 running on the Perl 6 server we have at UNH. I might wait though considering I have other things depending on Apache on that server– and if that ain’t broke… no need to fix it.

3:51 pm: Now it’s Jeff Horwitz on mod_perl6.

3:31 pm: Patrick’s back at it with specifics on how to contribute directly to the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation. Many Perl 6 functions are written in Perl 6 but may require optimization if they turn out slow. This seems like dressing in front of a mirror.

2:47 pm: Patrick is done with the regexes talk. Now for a break and to decide whether to stick with Patrick for the afternoon, or check out a session on command-line Perl. I’m tempted to stay with Patrick.

2:37 pm: Is this stuff happening in other languages? It seems like these new features are fast approaching the high level on which the brain itself works. So much of the work is done for you. How can a language be rated on how high-level it is compared to others?

2:22 pm: Perl 6 regexes are subroutines and can be named. They can also be used in other regexes. And by the way since I can’t type the examples as fast as I’m being shown them, Patrick’s slides will be available here soon.

2:17 pm: old and busted: =~. New hotness: ~~.

2:02 pm: on to regular expressions with Patrick.

1:52 am: starting to think Perl 6 should be classified as a performance enhancing drug for programmers. I can’t believe how terse and powerful this stuff is. They should call it Perl 7, it’s got that much more.

1:47 pm: passing parameters to Perl 6 subroutines is going to be heaven. Named parameters are optional by default but may be made to be required with an exclamation point in the subroutine signature. Yummy.

1:36 pm: Patrick Michaud is giving us a Perl 6 101. Sigils are *part* of the variable names in Perl 6. Ruby-like method syntax is really helping a lot of statements to become more concise.

11:32 am: Lunchtime. The part of the conference intended not to bust my brain has officially ended. No more keynotes.

11:30 am: Yaakov is talking about how to get involved in the Perl community.

11:20 am: Jerry Gay is reiterating the promise of using different languages within the same process on the Parrot VM.

11:13 am: Larry’s keynote, which consisted entirely of showing us Perl 6 error messages, is over. Parrot guys next.

11:09 am: old and busted: <STDIN>. New hotness: $*IN.lines

11:07 am: ’strict’ is on by default in Perl 6.

10:45 am: In Perl 6, ‘comb’ is just like ’split’, except you say what you want, not what you don’t want.

10:37 am: Larry Wall is talking about Perl 6 error messages and why it’s hard to read programmers’ minds. And how the need for sane error messages feeds into language design and vice versa.

10:30 am approx: opening keynote by Richard Dice of The Perl Foundation was mostly about budget, grants, etc. There was also a mention of how active the European and Russian Perl communities are, and a new Perl org in Japan.