[Israel.pm] Report on the Haifa Perl Mongers Meeting Yesterday

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

This is a report and some notes from the Haifa Perl Mongers meeting yesterday.

I arrived there by train from Tel Aviv with Sawyer, who was going to give the 
presentation about Moose. We met in the Arolozerov train station, and I was a 
little late since I noticed I had dressed too lightly for the cool weather. We 
bought tickets and went on the train to Haifa.

On the way we talked about Perl, C, C#, bugs in CPAN modules, Chuck Norris 
facts, and other stuff. We arrived at Haifa well ahead of time, and I led the 
way to the meeting at Qualcomm. As it turned out, the road I took was 
relatively sub-optimal because there was a way with more pavements going 
there. But we got there.

We entered Qualcomm, and saw Shmuel there and we were given tags for entrance 
(in exchange for our I.D. cards). We wanted to drink something and the cooler 
was broken, so we ended up using the tap. We waited for everyone else to 
arrive and in the meanwhile I munched on a croissant and a Rogalach.

Then the presentations started. Erez gave a good presentation about how to 
talk to newbies, where he said that a lot of the things we say are irrelevant. 
Asking people to add "use strict" will cause their scripts to stop running 
completely whereas they previously only had a bug, so it's not always the best 
strategy. The old "RTFM" mantra or "You can't just make shit up and expect the 
computer to know what you mean, retardo!" were also mentioned.

He then gave a few links where people can visit to help newcomers. He 
mentioned http://learn.perl.org/ but I was disappointed that he didn't mention 
http://perl-begin.org/ . Erez said that he believed that 
http://learn.perl.org/ was "a community site", but for a long time (many 
years) it went completely unmaintained and its source code was locked behind a 
firewall, and all this was depsite the fact that I offered my help in 
revamping it and free-of-charge. In all this time I maintained 
http://perl-begin.org/ and constantly improved it, and also made it available 
under the very permissive CC-by licence, and perl-begin's source code was made 
available in a publicly accessible Subversion repository.

learn.perl.org has recently opened its version control system and accepted 
some contributors but progress on it has been slow. I wanted to do something 
with it in January, but was informed that "a plan is formed for 
learn.perl.org" and that I should wait until February. This in turn was 
delayed due to the DDoS attacks on irc.perl.org and meanwhile learn.perl.org 
remains without activity. So I would recommend people to use and link to 
http://perl-begin.org/ , but most people in the Perl community think that 
learn.perl.org is better for that due to its more official status.

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

In any case, then Sawyer gave his presentation introducing Moose. It was a 
good presentation and the audience spent more time discussing it than last 
time he has given it in Tel Aviv. We spent a lot of time discussing the 
clearing methods which turned out to be equivalent to 
delete($self->{'myfield'}) or so. Then we discussed the compilation-time 
overhead of Moose where someone said it was unacceptable because it would mean 
his test suite composed of many scripts would run much slower. We then 
discussed about whether most people use all of the features in Moose, and 
whether it indicates code bloat and is worth the extra overhead.

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

Then the meeting ended and we walked to the train station and returned home. 
Erez took the train with us and on the way home we discussed Java, Matt S. 
Trout and Planet Iron Man, Lambda Calculus, the earlier discussions about 
Moose and other stuff. I tried to explain to them about Lambda Calculus and 
not sure I was successful, but you can read what I had written about it here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/lc/

And what MJD wrote about it:

http://perl.plover.com/lambda/

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

So it was a very nice meeting and I greatly enjoyed it.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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