[VPM] December and January meetings

Peter Scott Peter at PSDT.com
Fri Nov 19 11:20:21 CST 2004


I propose cancelling the December Perl Mongers meeting, being that it 
would fall on the 21st.

For the January meeting, I have an idea for something lighter: a round 
table dissection of SelfGOL, the program Damian Conway calls the 
epitome of Perl Worst Practices, or (insert Australian accent) 
"*really* Extreme Programming."  See 
http://damian.conway.org/Courses/WorstPractice.html:

--------------
The SelfGOL program can:
    * self-replicate by printing its own source code,
    * rewrite other Perl programs to allow them to self-replicate their 
own source code too,
    * detect and report the small number of Perl programs that are not 
rewritable in this way,
    * transform itself or other Perl programs into cellular automata of 
arbitrary size and play Conway's "Game of Life",
    * animate any short text as a cycling marquee banner.
SelfGOL accomplishes these feats in under 1000 bytes of standard Perl, 
without importing any modules, and without using a single if, unless, 
while, until, for, foreach, goto, next, last, redo, map, or grep.
---------------

Damian gives a half-day presentation on how to understand this program, 
so we may not finish, but I have seen his short version of that talk 
and it is... entertaining.

-- 
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/
*** New! *** http://www.perlmedic.com/



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