[Melbourne-pm] Future meetings

Ryan, Martin G Martin.G.Ryan at team.telstra.com
Tue Aug 21 16:35:22 PDT 2012


> So what was the plan for September?

I don't have a talk but I do have a suggestion.

About a month or two ago, Scott brought a Raspberry Pi (among other hardware paraphernalia) for us all to gawk at and I think it was Toby who had started a perl module for it.

If you have a look around at the Raspberry Pi website (particularly here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/about), you can see that the aim is to get kids interested in being hobbyist programmers and  hardware hackers as they once were.  The Raspberry Pi has a magazine devoted to it called the MagPi (see themagpi.org) which has sections for learning a bit of unix CLI and administration, C programming, interfacing to some basic circuits and python programming for controlling the Pi's general purpose IO pins (GPIOs).

These things are selling like hot cakes and there's efforts underway to get them into schools and other education environments as soon as next year.

You know what I'm going to say, don't you?  If thousands of kids are going to get exposure to one of these, why don't we make an effort to get Perl in on the ground floor?  Or at least a passenger stepping on at the second or third floor?  The obvious thing is to approach the MagPi people (??) about a perl section in the magazine and to flesh out the module that Scott and Toby have already done 80% of.  ;-)

Even better would be to get parrot going on it and showcase some Perl6 examples - but I really have no idea what I'm talking about, now...

Feel free to tell me this is nuts or whatever - it just seems to me that it would be an interesting project that would deliver tangible benefits to the Perl community - and if we're scratching around for something to do anyway...


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