APM: 5th German Perl-Workshop

[Richard Jelinek]

PetaMem @ 5th German Perl-Workshop

Hi,

I would like to give you a brief summary about the 5th German
Perl-Workshop (www.perl-workshop.de) I attended this year in Bonn. The
workshop took place from March 5th to 7th with approx. 120 visitors,
most of them from Germany, but some from England and Holland, and at
least one from the Czech Republic. :-)

PetaMem was sponsoring this event and I had an opportunity to hold a
speech about Perl and AI (in German) in general. People were really
interested in the things we're doing, but they were even more
fascinated about the coding guidelines and the disciplinary approach
we're taking in the development of our systems (I was asked so I told
them about PPCG and so on). Well - it was a Perl conference after
all...

The conference wasn't held at the university Bonn-RheinRuhr as all the
past years, but at the Gustav Streseman Institute. Reason for this
was, that the university tried to charge some ridiculous amount for
the talk rooms. I personally didn't like the GSI very much, but the
organization seemed to be confident with it.

But I also had the time to attend many talks about progress done in
Perl or new Modules. Here's my impression.

Perl6:

Apocalypse6 is going to be out RSN, but as you may know the Apocalypse
Numbers are oriented on the chapters of the camel book and there are
still some 30 to go..
My personal opinion is, that Perl6 is a really cool language BUT I
seriously doubt, that any normal minded person or the average
programmer ever will grasp it. The other personal opinion is, that I
seriously doubt, that Perl6 is ever going to be completed.

Parrot is closely coupled with Perl6 and other Languages
development. It should be out in version 0.0.9 or so really soon
now. No new demo or anything has been shown.

POE:

I heard a talk about a Web-based centralised monitoring system that
used POE (Perl Object Environment), I also heard a small talk about
some LWP-scripting using POE. My thoughts about POE are twofold. On
one hand it seems to be a pretty framework for transparent nice
inter-process communication between Perl-Processes and probably I will
let a developer at PetaMem have a look at it for our distributed C/S
system. But on the other hand this POE is no real multitasking, but
more of a "time-slicing" being much more similar to something we know
as "cooperative multitasking".

This approach of course eases several things, but as we know from
Win3.11 (and similar), cooperative multitasking isn't really the
technology of the future.

CPAN:

CPAN is often considered as the holy cow of Perl. Many talk of it as
the "Perl Killer-Application". Well I mentioned - of course jokingly -
that "Yeah - it IS the Perl-Killer Application. Because if CPAN isn't
going to kill Perl - nothing will."

Why this? It is our experience, that many of the CPAN modules don't
stand to high quality standards. Often you have several modules for
one task and have to decide (search) which one is best, often finding
yourself in the need of reimplementing it, or heavy bugfixing.

Especially at the social event on the first day I had the opportuinty
to some interesting talks about CPAN and found, that some kind of a
moderated CPAN, CPAN with voting/download statistics, CPAN with
providing infos of test-feedback from the installed modules worldwide
would significantly improve the value of CPAN.

This is something the CPANPLUS module is trying to provide as backend,
but still much conceptional and implementational work on some
WEB-frontend/search remains to do. This could be an very rewarding
quest for a hitherto unknown Perlmonks-LUG (hint hint). :-)

Others:

You will find the complete timetable of the (mostly german) talks here
http://www.perl-workshop.de/2003/times.epl Several of these talks were
known to me before, e.g. Mark Overmeers Mail:: modules tutorial, the
(qualified) PHP and Perl comparison done by Brigitte Jellinek.

Several interesting CPAN modules were mentioned in the Lightning
talks. The most interesting (and definitedly something we will give a
try at PetaMem was CPANPLUS.

All in all the Workshop was nice, but I had quite the impression, that
not everyone found it as nice or as interesting as the last
workshop. Well - if you're hard with your decisions, then you can
state that its practically the same and for an experienced Perl hacker
not very much new facts were presented. On the other hand these
Workshops are about contacts and to keep touch with the community and
yes - there were many familiar faces.


-- 
best regards,

     Dipl.-Inf. Richard Jelinek

     - PetaMem s.r.o. - Ocelarska 1 - Prague - www.petamem.com -
		       -= 2026049 Mind Units =-

Legal/Rechtliches:

This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If
you are not the intended recipient (or have received this e-mail in
error) please notify the sender immediately and destroy this
e-mail. Any unauthorized copying, disclosure or distribution of the
material in this e-mail is strictly forbidden.

Diese E-Mail enthält vertrauliche und/oder rechtlich geschützte
Informationen. Wenn Sie nicht der richtige Adressat sind oder diese
E-Mail irrtümlich erhalten haben, informieren Sie bitte sofort den
Absender und vernichten Sie diese Mail. Das unerlaubte Kopieren sowie
die unbefugte Weitergabe dieser Mail ist nicht gestattet.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send a mail to majordomo at hfb.pm.org
with command "unsubscribe prague-pm" in the message body.