[Oc-pm] Damian Talk

David Romano david.romano at gmail.com
Mon Oct 8 20:46:40 PDT 2007


Hi everyone,

Despite last minute planning, 3 members of OC PM went to Damian's talk
on Thursday down in San Diego: Vijay, Pete, and David. We headed off @
around 5pm and made good time, with little traffic, but we weren't able
to enjoy the beers that Vijay had in the cooler. But we did have
excellent food at Nico's Tacos (suggested by a few San Diego Perl
Mongers), near the lavish Qualcomm facility that the meeting was held
at. Chris Grau, Bob Kleeman, and about 25 others others were also in the
audience with us.

The talk started with a discussion of why it was entitled Sex and
Violence, and then Damian segued into the history of Perl, starting at
around 50 billion years ago with the Big Bang. In several instances, the
violence was directed at Java. Some notable quotes:
    "The way to market Perl 6 is to tell your manager it's a new version
    of Java and all the dollar signs represent the money they're
    saving."

    "Westheimer's Rule for schedule estimation: (G_max x 2)^(u + 1),
    where you take your most pessimistic estimate, multiply it by 2, and
    raise it to the power of your unit increased by one unit of
    granularity. For example, your most pessimistic estimate is 3 weeks,
    your project will take 6 months (3 weeks * 2 -> 6 weeks -> 6
    months)"

The bulk of the talk consisted of 7 technical and 7 social lessons, some
of which were "have pithy goals," "project management isn't just for
drones," "volunteers are voluntary," "optimize for the common case," and
"first kill all the theorists." There were also a lot of Perl 6 examples,
along with explanations for the syntax and reasons for the design
decisions. Also good reasons for why it's taken 7 years was given at
different times. 

Great time was had by all. We're just bummed that it looks like it's
gonna be another year before a beta version is available.

- David

-- 
"Abstraction, difficult as it is, is the source of practical power."
    -- Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity


More information about the Oc-pm mailing list