[LA.pm] Damian Conway, Guest Presenter at TO.pm

[Aran Deltac]

This coming Wednesday, July 12th, ValueClick Inc. has sponsored Dr.
Damian Conway to speak at the Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers.  Here is an
overview of the talk that Damian will be conducting:

 

-------------------

Extreme Perl - The Horror That Is SelfGOL

 

In this talk Damian dissects the SelfGOL program: an obfuscated,
self-aware, viral quine that can:

 

*	self-replicate, 
*	rewrite other Perl programs to allow them to self- replicate, 
*	detect un-rewritable Perl programs, 
*	execute itself or other Perl programs as cellular automata of
arbitrary size (to 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.

 

To do all that in under 1K of code, it relies on some extreme
programming techniques, and on many of the obscure backwaters of the
Perl syntax. This talk explores both.

 

In other words, it's everything you never wanted to know about Perl, and
would have been afraid to ask.

-------------------

 

The talk is scheduled for 7pm to 9pm.  Bring your appetite, as pizza and
drinks will be provided.  More information about the event can be found
on our site: http://thousand-oaks-perl.org/.  Directions to the
ValueClick office may be found here:
http://thousand-oaks-perl.org/bin/view/Main/ValueClick.  If you live in
the LA basin please attend the event - WestLake is closer to LA than
Thousand Oaks and the drive up here will be well worth it.

 

Please RSVP to adeltac at valueclick.com if you plan on attending so that
we get enough food and chairs for everyone!

 

Thanks,

 

TO.pm

 

-------------------

More about Damian:

 

Damian Conway holds a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

 

A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of
numerous well-known software modules including: Parse::RecDescent (a
sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract
programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English
transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple
dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic
reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT
(resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code
manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial
code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata
(programming in Latin). All of this software is available free from your
local CPAN mirror.

 

A well-known member of the international Perl community, Damian was the
winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical
Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was
subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical
committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source
conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", and author of
the books "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices". In 2001
Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent
20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/losangeles-pm/attachments/20060710/94fbf051/attachment.html