SPUG: April 2009 Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Meeting

Michael R. Wolf MichaelRWolf at att.net
Wed Apr 22 14:43:30 PDT 2009


On Apr 22, 2009, at 11:49 AM, C.J. Adams-Collier wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:49:43AM -0700, Michael R. Wolf wrote:
>
>> And they even elicited the laughs of a little girl in the audience.
>> (An effective technique for creating a talk that was effective at
>> many levels.)
>
> Scarlet had an excellent time.  The LOLCat slides were appreciated  
> the most :)
>
> Sorry if we interrupted the talk more than appropriate.  Feel free to
> flame me off-list for bringing a kid to an adult play date!


Au contrare...  I think that our culture has too many mono-cultures.   
I think it's great to acknowledge that life isn't a balance of  
opposites as much as it is an integration of multiplicities.

Some cultures would say "EITHER come to the meeting OR spend time with  
your daughter".

I love that our could find a way for you to do BOTH!!!  I think  
everyone benefited by you both attending.

You and Scarlet reminded me of the Wall Family at OSCON

I once asked one of his daughters (privately - to avoid bias) what she  
got out of attending.  She said that she enjoyed many of the talks and  
also the opportunity to spend family time.  It was, to my opinion, a  
genuine answer.  I'd seen her grow up over the few OSCON's I'd been  
to, from a youngster to an engaged-to-be-married young woman.  Perhaps  
I wax poetic about women and Perl, but does anyone else remember  
Larry's State of the Onion address (a talk that's BOTH never about  
Perl and always about Perl) where he started the talk with a picture  
of his first grandkid, then talked about the phases of his children's  
lives from being cute but helpless through mid-life, knowing that  
they'd again move toward old age and helplessness.  In his short nod  
to Perl, he likened it to one of his daughters -- not as cute (for the  
childish definition of cute) as she had been as a young girl, but  
nevertheless in mid-life, strong, confident, competent, working the  
issues that make a family/culture/world work, with a long run ahead of  
her before decrepitude and the reverence of post-middle-age.  In other  
nods, he casually mentioned other languages in phases that Perl's  
already mastered or may eventually enter.  You can fill in the  
languages and phases here.....

On another Wall-ism, I once asked Gloria (Larry's wife) about a point  
that Larry had made in a lecture.  It bordered on the "Technology of  
Perl" and the "Culture of Perl".  (Gloria knows *lots* of Perl by  
osmosis, and by her interest in linguistics and community-building.   
They're not partnered by accident.)  As a follow-up, I asked her  
"What's more important about Perl: the language or the culture".   
Without hesitating, she gave me an answer that seemed at once deeply  
rooted in her human linguistic studies and also deeply appropriate to  
Perl5/Perl6 -- "You can't separate a language from its culture".

Thanks for BOTH attending.  I like what it says about our culture.

-- 
Michael R. Wolf
     All mammals learn by playing!
         MichaelRWolf at att.net



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