YAPCR: Yet Another Perl Conference Report

Last week, I attended YAPC, Yet Another Perl Conference, organized by the Perl Mongers Organization, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It was impressive enough that I think it deserves a little attention.

General Impressions

Kevin Lenzo, a graduate student in computer science at CMU (and a member of the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers), organized the conference. He was roundly praised. The conference attendees gave him a book (Cryptonomicon, the new Neal Stephenson novel) and his mother another book (Yes, I said his mother; she got a very nice collection of short stories), both signed by everyone attending the conference. It was warm and homey.

The conference ran very smoothly. Carnegie Mellon University provided good conference space -- one very large conference room that split into three good-sized rooms for most of the day. Presentations ran pretty smoothly, with a few more glitches than usual, but nothing terribly bad. Most presentations were made from attached and projected PCs (most running Linux, of course). No presentation seemed to have Internet access. The presentations were less well-prepared and more informal than at most conferences, but that made sense. The tenor of the conference was one of egalitarianism, and most presenters saw themselves as part of the same community as the audience. The audience agreed. Audience participation was common and seemed natural. However, in some cases, this informality led to talks that were rambling and self-indulgent.

There were two kinds of rambling talks. In a couple of cases, the presenter seemed to be someone who had longed for the opportunity to discuss his particular interest and project, and, in the real world, found few willing listeners. Finally in the midst of many Perl-loving colleagues, these presenters opened the floodgates and released wave after wave of arcane Perl information. The audience was forgiving of such presenters because the presenter's respect for his material was so evident, and, because, well, they like arcane Perl information.

The other kind of rambling talk showed a lack of preparation on the part of a couple of presenters. These presenters, I felt, didn't prepare enough because of their assumption that the audience would be very forgiving. Such presenters got lost in their slides or had to explain why they couldn't show one slide or another. One presenter said something like: "These slides have some technical errors, but I know you'll understand. You're not like the people who attend those $299 tutorials and expect every slide to be perfect." The audience seemed less comfortable with this view. Although the attendees didn't pay $299 to attend, they still expected the spreakers to be well-prepared and the slides to be accurate.

Let me emphasize that most of the talks I attended were very useful and well-prepared. Some were versions of talks or courses that would have cost a lot more as part of other conferences or courses.

Conference proceedings were made available the first morning of the conference. Many presentations were not included (part of that informality, I guess) but will be available from the conference website. I just checked and didn't see the proceedings yet, although the list of speakers and abstracts is up. I suspect that Kevin is still recovering from YAPC preparation and hasn't had time to update the site.

The food was okay but downscale. Lunches were a box lunch sandwich on Thursday and pizza on Friday. Dinner on Thursday was institutional buffet: chicken piccata (they said), vegetable lasagne (a lot like a chicken pot pie without the pie crust or the chicken), boiled beans, salad, and dessert, all on plastic plates with plastic utensils. All breaks had coffee or soda and muffins, cookies, cheese cubes, or other snack-like objects. The food was more than reasonable given the price of the conference.

Sponsors

Presentations in a Nutshell

Keynote: Larry Wall

It was an interesting talk, however, because it was humorous; it focused on very accessible Perl scripting (even I could follow it); and it featured Larry, a very self-effacing Perl deity. It was very well-received.

XML and Perl

Other XML tools, like jade and expat, have clear strengths and weaknesses that make their use a matter requiring analysis. expat, for example, which is part of the XML::Parser module in Perl, checks that an XML document is "well-formed" but does not validate it. (A well-formed XML document follows all the generic rules of XML; for example, all beginning tags will have end tags. A valid XML document will also follow the rules of an associated Document Type Definition; for example, a DTD might specify that a header-level 3 tag has to be subordinate to a header-level 2 tag.) Thus, to understand whether you want to use this module, you need to understand whether validation is important to your document.

Someone more experienced with XML will probably dispute my examples above; it's difficult to make completely accurate short statements about XML. During Jonathan's talk, for example, a fellow from the audience kept making exacting corrections to Jonathan's slides. I thought Jonathan might take offense. It turns out that the "heckler" was Clark Cooper, Jonathan's co-author. Hmmm.

Jonathan made a point of XML's inability to display information easily, especially over the Web. I'm not sure that this will be a serious problem for long. The next generation of browsers should handle XML natively. In the meantime, just convert XML to HTML.

The point of Ben Holzman's talk was that XML is a good tool for regularizing the syntax in configuration files. I'll have to pass on describing this one. Ben went from the general statement above to a series of tasks and the associated Perl scripts, skipping the middle layer that related the scripts to the overall goal. I was lost until Ben's final point: "Object-orientation is pretty cool." The code will be in the proceedings at www.yapc.com. I leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Ben represented the other difficulty with much of the discussion of XML: the presenter knows what he does with XML, but those tasks get lost in the details of the code. I would have enjoyed this talk more if I were a serious Perl coder.

News from the Development Front: Dick Hardt

Dick explained that Activestate's version of Perl supports the OnePerl effort. This goal, rather than differentiating Win32 Perl from other platforms, incorporates them under one specification. Among the work being done now by ActiveState is COM support on Unix, for example. This work allows Unix servers to work cleanly with Perl scripts running on Windows clients. In fact, nobody challenged or attacked Dick. They seemed to understand that improving Win32 Perl and integrating it with other versions of Perl was good for the Perl community and for Microsoft. Of course, just in case, he did give away free frisbees.

Dick expects Activestate's version of Perl to be part of Microsoft's Services for Unix V2 product. He does not expect Microsoft to ship Perl as part of Windows or NT. He promised a Beta of Perl 5.6 by the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in mid-August.

Dick also admitted that he has seen "The Phantom Menace" three times.

Chris Nandor - macperl

However, his current version is just into beta, and there are some major holes, lack of perl/tk support being the major one. (If you want to port Tk to the Mac, Nandor wants you.)

Lies We Tell Ourselves about Perl: Nat Torkington

• Perl isn't slow. (It has to be slower than C.)
• Okay, it's slow but Moore's Law (the rapid increase of hardware-based speed) will make it okay. (That's nothing Perl can take credit for, and besides, Moore's Law works for the faster languages also.)
• Perl is easy to learn. (It is easy to use, but it's so terse, and provides so many ways to do something, that it can be difficult to learn.)
• Perl is readable. (Only if the coder makes it so; it can be completely unreadable, too.)
• It's okay to write "baby" perl. (Read the calumny in the chats and newsgroups hurled at those coders who do write simplified code.)
• If you know C, you can write the time-critical parts of an application in C. (So what is Perl for?)
• Perl certification is possible, based on Perl specs. (The specs aren't good enough and Perl isn't set up for certification-type tests: too much freedom.)
• Develpmen by perl5 porters is as good as development by commercial developers. (Not true; not as reliable.)
• Many eyes find the bugs. (Nice point, but many bugs are obscure and only a few people are really capable of finding and fixing them.)
• Perl moves 2 billion Euros a day. (It does, apparently; but European companies can't find enough Perl programmers; Perl programmers (Note this, European readers!) are actually being offered a higher hourly rate than C++ programmers. Companies won't use a product if they can't find staff.)
• Don't do it in C++; do it in Perl. (Perl cannot always do what C++ can, or do it as well.)
• Don't reinvent the wheel - use CPAN. (Perl is fun; we *like* to reinvent the wheel.)
• Conclusion: Perl sucks. Use Python. (Nat's sardonic final remark; it drew a few derisive laughs from the crowd.)

Nat admitted that his remarks were in some case half-truths as well, but he intended them to burst some balloons and make people think about some of the assumptions they made.

Perl Hardware Store: Mark-Jason Dominus

His tools included:

• Schwartzian Transforms (named after Randal by Tom Christiansen) -- sorting a list by a hidden attribute (sorting filenames by date w/o printing the date)
• Manual exporting w/o the Exporter (arranging functions in one package for export, so they appear as if they were in another package; isn't that like shoplifting?)
• Adding a New Method to a Package
• Semaphore Files (using a 'semaphore' to allow locking of a file so that it can't be overwritten during the process of opening and locking it)
• Memoizing (A memoized function caches its return values)

For the code and a further explanation, see the conference proceedings, when they are available. Mark-Jason's notes are quite complete.

M.-J. D. is an unorthodox (read: barefoot) presenter. He is quite lively and a dynamic speaker. He could be more concerned about the accuracy of his slides.

Elaine Ashton - History of Perl

If you're interested in viewing all historical Perl events, visit the YAPC website.

Randal Schwartz: Reducing Business Risk Using Perl

Randal warns against overuse of globals, use of certain outdated modules, Y2K problems, warnings in running code, code "zombies", and other potential performance and security problems. Nice talk.

Randal knows this material.

Adam Turoff - Effective Perl Mongering

As noted, the Perl Mongers are loosely organized. There are chapters in most cities and on five continents. The chapters continue to exist as long as the particpants are motivated to attend the meetings. Therefore, chapters mix useful presentations and discussions with social events. Did I mention the beer?

Adam called on Brian D. Foy, who discussed the Perl Mongers' White Camel award. The White Camel, it seems, is a rare and highly prized animal. The award will be given to members of the Perl community who make crucial non-technical contributions to Perl. You can nominate someone at starting on July 8. The winners will be announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.

Perl/Gtk+: Geoff Harrison (Mandrake)

His presentation of Gtk+ and Perl was not very scripted; he mostly demonstrated widgets. It may be that others who understood Gtk+ and technology like Tk would have appreciated this talk more. Geoff certainly claimed that Gtk+ had features that went well beyond those available through Tk. Check the YAPC web site if interested.

Geoff talked during the lunch break about his true love, Englightenment, a GUI he's developing right now. He seemed quite energized about it. It does seem like a technology that could be important in the Linux community.

Perl and Databases: Chris Winters

Chris noted in his talk, as I will here, that O'Reilly & Associates has a book in the works on this topic by Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce. Tim is the creator and maintainer of the Perl::DBI module. Expect this book later this fall.

Rebuilding Post-Apocalyptic Civilization with Perl: Jon Orwant

Jon ranged over a number of interesting facts: for example the amount of data DirecTV drops out of the sky onto your head each minute. A gigabyte, that's how much. He figured out which characters were most used in CPAN and was able to arrange a Dvorak-like keyboard for the post-apocalyptic Perl programmer. It was pretty amazing. Based on Jon's predictions, though, I'll be happy to be among the victims of this bomb.

Town Hall Forum: Kevin Lenzo

The revenue fell a couple of thousand short of expenses. We passed the hat. As I said: warm and homey.

Will there be a YAPC II, someone wondered? Next year, about the same time, at CMU again, Kevin confirmed. They're looking to double the size. They may adopt a sliding scale of charges to raise a little more money, charging people like me more without charging more to students and such. They're looking into adding a day, perhaps for extended tutorials.

Social Notes from the Steel City

• WDUQ, the public radio station managed by Duquesne University, may be the best radio station in the world. It broadcasts great, accessible jazz (Pittsburgh's jazz roots are deep) and National Public Radio news. Don't visit the Pittsburgh air space without first tuning your radio to 90.5 on your FM dial.

• When I was in high school in a suburb just outside Pittsburgh, we went to the Oakland neighborhood (where CMU and the University of Pittsburgh are) to go to Original Hot Dog. We had heard, in my protected little suburb, that you could find prostitutes there. We went, but we never found a prostitute (to our knowledge, anyway, which was admittedly limited). We bought the hot dogs, though, which was better anyway, because we knew what to do with them. I went back to Original during the conference and had a hot dog, fries, and a draft (Iron City) beer. Just as good as ever. If you go, order the small fries. A large order will kill you, and even the medium is beyond your capabilities if you're not from the Steel City.

• The Cathedral of Learning, the towering edifice at the middle of Pitt's campus, looks like an elongated version of the structure Richard Dreyfuss made out of mashed potatoes in "Close Encounters".

• I drove past my old house in the suburb of Mount Lebanon. I'd forgotten how square and sturdy Pittsburgh's brick and stone houses are. My entire street looks like it was built by the third Little Pig.

• One person at the conference admitted to having seen "The Phantom Menace" five times. He was old enough to vote. It may soon be necessary to consider Benevolent Despotism a viable governmental form.

Frank Willison
Editor-in-Chief, Technical Publishing

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