German Perl Workshop, Day Two

[busunsl]

Today TheDamian held a three hours talk about Perl 6.
The main message was 'The sky isn't falling on your head!'.
He convinced us that the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 are not that hard to accept and that changes to old programs can be very few. But they can be very heavy if you switch to Perl 6 idioms.
He was open for lots of questions and hints for further 'improvements' from the audience. (He probably will never forget the 'ß' :-)
It was a great talk.

In davorg's talk on 'Idiotic Perl' he showed us what kind of problems Perl beginners might have and how we can help them to improve.
He 'ranted' a bit about bad books (you probably know some), bad scripts (you most probably know them) and talked about his efforts to help (the beginners as well as the authors).
At the end he talked short about nms.

Gerald Richter described the upcoming embperl 2.0 (currently in beta 6) and the task of building the embperl website with embperl.

Leon Brocard (acme) told a bit about parrot, showed some examples of parrot assembler and got some very intresting quiestions. ;-)

Nick Clark talked about 64-bit integers in Perl 5.8.
But this time it was not a Lightning Talk as at YAPC::Europe 2001 and so everyone could follow.
Well almost, for he had to be really fast and the twenty minutes just weren't enough.

Next was Marc Lehmann talking about coroutines and continuations.
An intresting way to have multiprocessing without threads or processes.
Checkout his Coro modules

Marc Overmeer gave a short overview of Mail::Box, a module designed to replace all other existing mail modules.
It is a huge effort and he needs help for further development.

After a short break with snacks there were several BoF sessions.

• Perl/CPAN and Topic Maps - lead by Alexander Sigel and Jan Algermissen
• BioInformatics - lead by Bernhard Schmalhofer
• Idiotic Perl continued - spontaneously arranged by davorg
• Perlmon(k|ger)s - spontaneously arranged by one of the Frankfurt Perl Mongers and me

Since I only attended the Perlmon(k|ger)s BoF session, I can't say anything about the other three.
In our BoF there were only two Monks (Corion and me, I think the rest was with davorg) and only four Perlmongers, but lots of people were intrested in joining or raising a Mongers group.