Okay first day at YAPC…
Missed most of the opening speeches and Larry Wall’s Keynote.. d’oh. Then again trying to handle the incoming rush of attendees was quite the experience. I’d say jumbled is a good word for how we handled it but at least it got handled. It’s pretty hard handling the Japanese Incoming Rush that seems such a common phenomenon in Japan.
Perl as a Second Language Notes
Sat in on the Perl as a Second Language Talk. Here are some of my messy notes
- There is one than one way to say it
- Some languages pay more attention to certain details than others (Lots of ways to say cousin in Chinese vs Japanese and English)
- Showed some examples of Hello World in other languages
- The Ruby example hung! D’oh! No that isn’t because Ruby is slow….
- Showed the ever popular Y-Combinator example in Scheme then showed a Perl version
- One beneficial thing about expresstivity languages is the ability to skip saying the obvious
- What makes Perl different?
- Perl does not have OOP built-in (Yes… I know)
- Shows an example using autobox
- Perl can be a good language for learning OOP (because you can learn to make your own OO system)
- Dan defines an Object to be data that knows what to do (I welcome our self-aware Object overlords)
- Perl objects are references! (D’oh, I need to understand what a reference is… I’ll just assume pointer…)
- Shows an example of objects with the Mom class and Daughter class
- our @ISA defines parent-child class relationship in Perl
- Implementing is…
- References – for storing data
- bless – teach data how to find it? (Sorta spaces out here)
- More than one way to implement OO (no kidding, look at CLOS)
- “1” + “1” is not “11” because Perl is a context-oriented language
- However 1 . 1 IS 2 (Operators tell you a lot about what to do I guess)
- perl -MO=Deparse is handy…
- DWIM – Context is important for this (Somehow I don’t think I’ll ever get a computer to DWIM)
The other talks
After that… somehow I missed most of the others.. oh yeah I was busy trying to volunteer but I did manage to catch
mizzy’s – Easy system administration programming with a framework – フレームワークでシステム管理プログラミングをもっと簡単に
Easy system administration programming with a framework
- It’s called Punc (Perl Unified Network Controller)
- I learned about CodeRepos which seems to be a popular SourceForge-like area for Japanese (Perl) hackers…
- Punc looks like a clone of puppet except it uses JSON instead of XML-RPC for the data format to transfer
- Looks like it’s still bleeding edge software (checkout from trunk and play with it)
- Uses a Facter clone called PFacter (Are these two interchangeable? That would be realllly nice… otherwise you suck for making yet another clone that does the same thing but can’t be interchangeable…)
- Dude where’s your test cases?
- I somehow missed the reasons for writing Punc (Although because I can seems like a good enough reason for many….)
- I guess if you REALLY want Perl for a Config Management system and don’t mind getting your hands dirty with sending patches this might work but I’m not wedded to any particular language but I am wedded to a more mature implementation
- I’m sticking with Puppet
Afterwards came Lightning Talks which were really good. Here’s my blurry recollection of them (wish I took notes…)
- One presenter seemed to have gotten close to written a Perl OS (Perl Machine)… whoah…
- One presenter showed an interesting aggregator named Plagger (or was that Fastladder) that supposedly could aggregate anything on the web (supported authenticated sites yaaay) including one IRC commentors suggestion that it could be a perfect tool to aggregator pr0n pics
- TT-something template looked nifty… wish Ruby had that
- Text::MicroMason looked also nifty since it seemed like an ERB-clone so that’s less learning
- Vroom::Vroom is quite impressive (VIM as your presentation tool)
- Developing Amazon’s Dynamo in POE and Erlang showed some interesting contrasts between how the messaging would work if implemented in POE versus Erlang
Lightning Talks are probably one of my favorite events in a conference since 5 minutes really forces you to get to the point. There was also the dinner party which is what I guess you could expect from large amounts of geeks with large amounts of food and booze. Okay last day coming up! I need sleep…
