Onions and on...

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Larry Wall gives the State of the Onion speech (how Perl is doing).

This is the first time I've seen the SOTO from the inventor of Perl
but have really been looking forward to it. They're usually
hilarious. Hopefully we'll get a little bit about Perl 6.

He does read his speeches and he has kind of a funny voice, but
somehow it works! There's always a thread through the speech ...this
time it's screensavers. While he's talking, all these different
screensavers (mazerunner, ant spotlight, game of life, the qix drawer,
mutator, etc) and relates it to the cognitive process and so on.
(ADHD, wandering mind, symmetry, repressed memory, how big business is
gobbling up smaller ones, and the government).

When he's talking about his battle with a tumor/ulcers/blindness, the
screensavers were hilarious (the running down the tube, the spotlight,
bumps, zoom). It's wonderful that he can find humor in all the pain
he's been through. But it certainly should shut down the critics
clamoring for Perl6 now. Larry Wall is Well Loved.

Paul Graham spoke next. He looks nothing like I expected, but I guess
I was expecting something from his picture at
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html He's actually a very smooth
speaker - he must have rehearsed this extensively! He's talking about
hackers, and making them happy. Plays well to this audience, but ten
years of business people "eating the seed corn" of their good
programmers and destroying their productivity shows no sign of slowing
down, in my opinion (could be because of how Amazon's commodotizing me
at the moment). Or possibly, I don't know how good I have it and am
suffering from a nothing-is-good-enough. Won't know til I'm out!

Finally, a last-minute substitution gave us YADT (Yet Another Damian
Talk). (there's a lot of YA acronyms at these conferences) This one is
Life, The Universe, and Everything. Actually I believe I've seen this
one before but it's fabulously hilarious as usual.

Seriously if they had the Damian Conway conference I'd go. If they
had the Conway Channel (as he jokes) I'd Tivo it. He's a professional
speaker, in that this is really all he does to make money. But he's
also an itinerant professor from Monash U in Austrailia, and
contributes huge amounts to the Perl community, lately all Perl 6.

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1 Comments

Nancy Treder said:

I wish that I was as smart as you. Your journal entries are a window to your thought process and thirst for knowledge. These conferences are good for you because I hear how passionate you are about programming. You are an artist of bits and bytes that change the world everyday for people and they don't even notice it. I'm so proud of you!
N

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This page contains a single entry by Doug Treder published on July 27, 2004 9:00 PM.

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