This week on Perl 6 (9/9 - 9/15, 2002)
by Piers Cawley
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The Perl 6 Mini Conference in Zurich
Also going on last week was a Perl 6 mini conference, held in Zurich. Larry, Damian, Dan, Allison and Hugo all gathered to sit around a table and thrash out some more of the Perl 6 design. I assume that whiteboards were also available. As well as doing design work, there was a mini conference, complete with talks from all of the above, and due to time and money commitments I couldn't make it. However, Paul Johnson could, and he wrote me a report, which I present here pretty much unedited.
A Report, by Paul Johnson
Last week, Perl 6 moved to Zürich. The bulk of the Perl 6 design team was here as guests of ETH, and spent the week, er, designing Perl 6 I suppose. But maybe they were out exploring Zürich and its environs. If they were, who can blame them? If they weren't, well they'll just have to came back another time :-)
On Thursday and Friday they also managed to fit in a Mini::Conference on Perl 6. In attendance were Larry Wall, with his wife, Gloria, Damian Conway, Dan Sugalski, Allison Randall and Hugo van der Sanden.
We were treated to two days of talks and discussion about Perl 6. Larry Wall gave the keynote speech to start the conference. As always, Larry's talk was interesting and entertaining. The scheduled topic was "Studies in the Ballistic Arts", however, Larry said that this title was prepared before the talk itself, and the talk, along with the title, morphed into one about the Science of Perl. This will be heard again at YAPC::E in a few days, and so I won't spoil it by attempting to summarise it here.
Next up was Damian Conway, who gave his presentation entitled "Introduction to Perl 6", covering the first five Apocalypses. Damian has managed to acquire quite a reputation within the Perl community, and Larry promised that Damian would be more entertaining than he. That was quite a promise, but I don't think anyone was disappointed. Damian in turn promised that Dan, speaking next, would be more entertaining than he. I think Dan was probably too busy to notice, checking in some patches or redoing the GC or something.
Damian noted that the audience was probably more sympathetic than most he gave the presentation to, given that they had come to a two day conference devoted to Perl 6. There were nonetheless a number of people who were worried about the move to Perl 6, and one who was still worried about moving to Perl 5! I think that most of Damian's jokes flew high over the heads of most people, but I appreciated them at least. I suppose that XXXX (4x) hasn't made it to Switzerland. And maybe Crocodile Dundee wasn't such a big hit. Even Switzerland's joining of the UN two days earlier seemed to go unnoticed, although it is UNO here. I think there were a few Java programmers in the audience too, since when Damian mentioned about Java having a HelloWorld library about half the audience laughed and half seemed a little concerned that they hadn't heard of it before. And the suggestion that Archbishop Tutu might not like being interpolated was entirely missed. (Should we interpolate $to too?) Still, had the jokes been in German, they'd have flown right past me instead. And I trust Damian's German accent will stay in place should he have occasion to talk about B&D languages in Munich.
Unsurprisingly, Dan spoke about "The Parrot Virtual Machine". Dan actually gave two presentations back to back. The first was an overview of Parrot, and the second was a more detailed look at parts of it. This was a very interesting look at the fast moving world of perl6-internals and seemed to be well received by a knowledgeable audience.
The second day started with a presentation by Allison Randall entitled "Linguistic Basis of Perl 6". Every so often, in perl6-language in particular, some discussion about linguistics crops up, often referring to tagmemics. Allison explained to us what a tagmeme is, and how it relates to the design of Perl 6. I won't pretend to understand it all, but apparently tagmemics is the Swiss Army Knife of linguistics, a tagmeme is a unit in context, tagmemes are fractal, and both "etic" and "emic" are real words, protestations of my spell checker to the contrary notwithstanding. I understand that Allison gave this talk at TPC and will also give it at YAPC::E, so soon we'll all understand tagmemic matrices and be perfectly happy to get dropped off into some uncharted jungle.
Following Allison's presentation there were questions about some minor syntactic issues such as why the switch statement used "given" and "when" instead of "switch" and "case". The explanation of how nicely it read in English was countered with arguments that that wouldn't benefit the German speakers so much and that "switch" and "case" were probably already familiar to programmers. Damian suggested that maybe a German Perl grammar would be in order, to which the inevitable response was that a Swiss German grammar was really required, but which dialect would it be in? Damian showed how easy it would be to derive your own Perl grammar and change keywords if you didn't like them. This was also useful to the chap who wanted elsif spelt correctly.
Damian's second presentation was "Programming in Perl 6" in which he took a number of real Perl 5 programs written and regularly used by prominent members of the Perl community, and he changed them into Perl 6. He did this twice, first to produce a minimal delta change and second to produce idiomatic Perl 6, at least insofar as Perl 6 has managed to acquire idioms. Both of Damian's presentations were punctuated with questions to Larry, asking if what Damian had just presented was true this week too. In some cases the language design seemed to be taking place before our eyes.
This presentation seemed to allay a lot of fears and everyone seemed quite happy with Perl 6 to the extent that Damian finished half an hour early. The option was a long lunch or Damian offered to give his Lingua::Romana::Perligata presentation. I don't think there was ever any doubt, but when Larry mentioned that he had never heard that talk it was decided. The talk is normally two hours long, but Damian managed to squeeze it into 45 minutes. I think this was probably aided in part by most people simultaneously missing the jokes and being comfortable with a language which requires the matching of number, case and gender. I suspect this is the opposite from most native English speaking audiences.
Finally Hugo was here representing the face of sanity. He told us of his plans for Perl 5.10. These included making perl clean, small and fast. To this end he intends to rewrite parts of the regular expression engine, to oversee the creation of a scheme whereby there are multiple blessed perl installations, and to claw back some of the speed that has been lost since version 5 was released. In short, to ensure that making Perl 6 better, faster and stronger than Perl 5 is as difficult as possible.
Last on the agenda was a question and answer session with the entire team. This was especially interesting, in part I think because there was not an enormous number of questions. This allowed the answers to be complete, to the point of verging on rambling. That's not a bad thing, because it let us get past the superficial answers and into more philosophical areas. Dan told us why Parrot was called Parrot. Larry told us why Perl was called Perl, what it stood for and when, and why it was perfect for search engines even before there were search engines. Dan told us not to get worried about everything, after all, it's only ones and zeros. Damian and Dan alluded to interesting things they could tell us, but then they would have to shoot us. Larry speculated on whether placing a time bomb in the perl interpreter would help us find out who is using Perl and for what. Larry and Damian told us some scary things that people do with Perl and Larry told us he flew over here in one of them. Larry also told us the secret of leadership (which is at least 2000 years old), and talked about how well his goal for the community's rewrite of the community is working. And there was a bunch of other stuff that I was far too busy enjoying to make notes about.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and informative couple of days. Many thanks to ETH Zürich and in particular to David Schweikert for organising the event. Attendance was about 90, and profits, which look to be around CHF 4000 or so go the the Perl Foundation. Next stop: Münich.
