APM: Perl Workshop 4.0 Summary

[Richard Jelinek]

Hi,

let me give you a short summary of the Perl Workshop 4.0 that took
place in St. Augustin near Bonn from 13.2. to 15.2. this year.

Radek pointed me to this event and while he seemed from the beginning
very interested to attend it, I was in a "why not"-mood. We finally
managed in the last moment to synchronize us to get to this event and
departed 12.2. to St. Augustin. It took us about 9 hours to get to
St. Augustin from Prague. Later in the evening there was a first
informal meeting in our hotel where we met the first perl hackers.

It quickly turned out, that most of them really use Perl for what -
well - most of Perl hackers use it for: small Q&D programs, system
administration, web-programming. I was surprised to see there mainly
"End-Users" i.e. programmers and no project managers. I was a little
bit dissapointed, that there were no developers that were working on
large-scale projects in Perl.

I would like to give now my subjective impression about the tutorials
I've attended. (For comparation have a look at
http://www.perlworkshop.de/2002/times.epl):

Codegenerierung with perl (in German)

- Michael Rachow is a very sympathic, calm and handsome :-) man that
  tried to talk about codegeneration with perl. In my opinion, it was
  very low-tech what he talked about. Basically he showed some of the
  Macro-Features you can run on text datasets with Jeeves (the one
  from advanced perl programming)
- The auditorium quickly agreed on the fact, that Jeeves is just a
  nice technology demo, but that there are far better tools to
  accomplish this task. (e.g. Swig)

Extreme Perl (in English)

- Ok. This was my first time when I heard (and saw) Damian Conway
  talking, thinking and perling. Man this guy is exceptional. With
  "Extreme Perl" Damian wanted to show some of Perls possibilities
  that are very powerful, he also wanted to win a obfuscation
  contest. What was this talk about? It was about a program called
  SelfGOL.
  If you think, you are a perl guru and understand this language, have
  a look at this: http://www.f0.am/cgi-bin/view/Libarynth/SelfGOL
- The 90 minutes he explained this program seemed like 20 minutes to
  me and I was pretty paralyzed after this talk.

mod_perl 2.0 (in german)

- Gerald Richter is said to be one of the best programmers in the Perl
  Community. That may be (haven't verified), but he is not a very
  talented speaker. And probably I'm not *that* interested in
  mod_perl, so the whole talk was more like a slideshow of the new
  features of this module and a overview of what will come soon/next.

pVoice (in english)

- Jouke Visser has a handicapped daughter and wrote a set of programs,
  that help her to communicate with the help of special input devices
  (head and feet-driven) that are attached to a notebook (on which
  perl is running the pvoice application). http://www.pvoice.org/

P5EE - Perl 5 Enterprise Environment (in German)

- Gerald talked about the need to have some equivalent thing to J2EE
  and presented the P5EE project. While there is no doubt, that such a
  project would greatly improve acceptance of perl in the enterprise
  environment, one has to say, that this project is nowhere near a
  enterprise-capable state. If there will not be a bunch of companies
  taking P5EE development in their hands (and products) I predict,
  that this project won't see much success.

Programming Latin (in English)

- Damian again. Basically he showed very extensively, most of the time
  amusing, but in its full width also sometimes tiredning the
  Lingua::Latina::Perligata module. In short: How to program in
  Latin. The most interesting technology behind this is the
  Filter-Module of perl as well as a stack-based parser Damian needed
  to get the parsing of the position independent gramar of Perligata
  done.

---> In the evening many attendees met in Castle Birlinghoven, where
     they had some dinner in decent atmosphere. The dinner was
     sponsored by O'Reilly.

One impression I got from the first day was, that Perl is - I thank
for this insight to Damian - much more powerfull than I ever thought
it is. The other impression is, that many of the perl developers as
well as the organizators see perl to be descending in popularity
loosing much to Java - because "the dumb managers want to be it that
way". Well - we'll see what the future brings.

So that was the first day. If you are interested to get a short
overview about the other days let me know and I'll summarize them
also.


-- 
best regards,

     Dipl.-Inf. Richard Jelinek

 - PetaMem s.r.o. - Drahobejlova 1019 - Prague - www.petamem.com - 
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