I was at the YAPC::NA 2007 Perl Conference this week at the University of Houston in Texas.
Once again, it was a great conference, with about 200 people attending.
It was my first time in Houston, and boy was it humid. My eyeglasses fogged up every time I went outside. It might be the most humid place on earth, even moreso that Bali (on the equator.)
YAPC is a great value. The conference, 2 days of tutorials plus book and 5 nights of dorm accomodations was $384.
Sunday
- got up an hour before my flight
- hot and humid outside airport in Texas
- took bus from the airport, 73 and 30, 88 doesn’t run on Sunday
- city is not a war zone like Detroit or other inner cities, but rough. one drunk on the bus
- staying in Taub dorm in “the quadrangle”, has ok common
basement with TV lounge, weight room and laundry room
- spent evening at The Cadillac Mexican food restaurant
- very off-campus $25 cab ride
- $30 fajitas and cheesecake
Monday
- meeting rooms are in the 3-storey University Center
- scattered around vertically
- coffee
- number of fast-food restaurants: Wendy’s, Subway, Chili’s Too
- Cougar shop
- TV lounge with wide-screen flat-scree TV
- Game Center with FPS, pool, air hockey and bowling
Larry gave 2 talks in morning
- briliant comparative language analysis
- Perl borrows from other languages heavily
- Perl hits the sweet spot for programmer freedom
- Prolly too many object models in Perl5. one is enough.
Lifetime of Many Hats
- born near Pasadena
- almost drowned with styrofoam surfboard
- liked to specialize in everything
- dropped out of original uni program, worked, went
to missionary school and studied linguistics, back to uni
The Perl Foundation
- case study of dev shop that couldn’t find enough perl programmers,
tried Java, ended up with 25 of each
- creating materials for the public in MBA-speak
- Forester called them and asked for scripting language survey participation
- the analyst groups rank language by current capability
and long-term strategy equal weighed, perhaps problematic for perl
which has a mature perl5 but fuzzy perl6
- somebody has written a Perl module for the Facebook API,
overlooked in their initial API release
Dave Rolsky
- error, validation, logging
- good talk
Abigail
- sudoku solver with Perl regex
- regex is NP complete … so let’s do something insane
- 250 Kilobyte regex to solve 9×9 sudo, 90 minutes to run
- he can solve it by hand in less time
Tuesday
Resume talk was funny. Basically, don’t do things
like send a picture of yourself in a disco, show up
late, or be difficult. Based on real-world experience.
Perrin Harkin
- always thoughtful and practical
- but lolcats galore in slides
- tried VMware for snapshotting environment, 4x slow
disk io on their hw, moved to lvm
- uses version control, indifferent, cvs good enough
for a long time anybody who said otherwise was a crackpot
- use 2 branches (dev on main plus maintenance branch)
- test is important, Test::More is not enough because
of namespace pollution?
- tried to store db operations and roll back in perl,
prolly better to just truncate
Casey West
- working at SocialText, SocalCalc
- started project with MochiKit, web 2.0 ish framework
- roundelement for rounded corners
- cross-browser keyboard modifiers
- animation lib
- functional
- did one lolcat to mock Perrin
- switched to MooTools for JS, smaller memory footprint
Evan Carroll, Houston.pm, Dealermade
- catalyst with Dojo, template toolkit
- ruby with scriptaculous JS, integral
Nice dinner in Hilton ballroom.
Auction hosted by Uri. Quite humorous, raised about $4,000.
Dorm party afterwards, lot of alcohol. Talked to Julian Cash
a little. He is very artistic.
Talked to Beth and Adrian, 2 bioinformatics perl chicks.
Beth runs Ubuntu on her Powerbook G4 and Adrian Debian on her Dell
notebook.
Taub dorm party.
Wednesday
Beth from Ithaca did a talk on database programming with postgresql.
She uses it for bioinformatics work.
Some type of skit about the power of the yapc perl t-shirt.
Town Hall meeting rehashing usual Perl adoption issues:
- lack of corporate funding
- lack of PR
- lack of mindshare vs other languages
- poor state of Perl distros, but in LSB
Richard Dice mentioned some feedback from Forrester Research.
Perl was rated ok overall, with a hole in WSDL support.
This YAPC finished about $6,000 in black.
Talked to Perrin a little about file uploads and memory leaks
on mod_perl. He recommended either using Apache api,
reading by row, or using exit in your Apache::Registry script
to force child to die after the upload.
Talked to a Larry a little about parallel programming
with Perl6. Seems like comprehensive support for features
found in other languages like Haskell.
Thursday
Damion was unable to come to YAPC this year, so Randal Schwartz filled in for him for 2 days in the Advanced Perl training tutorial.
Randal did a good talk on his page-by-page views on Damion Conway’s Perl Best Practises book from 9 am to 2:30 pm.
I tend to identify more strongly with Randal’s programming style than Damion’s in some cases. For example, I’m not a big fan of English.pm.
Randal delved in detail into some areas of Perl upon prompting by the audience. He spent some extra time talking about Perl control structures.
