I’d tell you about the monster State of The Unions speeches, but I spent most of them either ferrying a cranky child around, or background-coding a blosxom moblogger for quinn and I to picture-o-gram the rest of OSCON. It’s in no fit state to show anyone, but if you’re interested, the program is really just a punched-up version of stripmime, some old code that ripped attachments out of mail so you could IMAP or POP them faster. I don’t multi-task welll, so I’m going to have fun refactoring it later to remove all the lines that say $copyfiletolarrywallsbeingquitefunny = $doesadaneedachange++ and so forth. (Yoz has been doing the same sort of thing with Moveable Type if you want proper code from a proper programmer).
Larry Wall was funny (and Ada, generally speaking, did need a change). I’m always unsure what new technical details one can pick out of these talks when so much is available online. I listen mainly for the personal stories, the emotional inflections you would otherwise miss. Wall, in his gentle way, touched on how he’d sacrificed a fair bit of his career and his mortgage to work on Perl 6. He’s just come out of hospital for ulcer treatment and it doesn’t sound unrelated. He wasn’t asking for pity, but he seemed relieved to announce that Damian and he had largely finished the Perl6 core language design.
I’m hoping to find my aha! moment with Perl 6 here. I think a lot of the Perl mongers are too. I heard a bunch of British Perlies cheering the new name for the Perl5-on-Parrot compiler, “Ponie”. As in the cockney rhyming slang, “pony and trap”. “There are many reasons for calling it Ponie”, said Larry, “none of them good.”
Guido mostly replayed his EuroPython keynote, which apart from the junking of the mooted Python equivalent to C’s (a?b:c), was straightforward, uncontroversial and reliably, Pythonically, dull. Guido said he’d strip down the language even more, if he knew how. Lots of pictures of his new son, which seemed to me to be perfectly in order.
We ran away from the talk with a klaxxonning Ada after Guido, and only skipped back in to hear the final talk on the State of Linux from Ted T’so. A fair bit of discussion about how 2.5 is more Java-friendly, although the Linux guys still insist it’s all Sun’s fault for their approach to threads (and T’so did manage to slip in a comment about “Write once, run screaming”). A bit of snippiness, too, aimed at Eric Raymond’s CML2 venture.
I’m actually meeting up with esr tomorrow. If he doesn’t shoot me dead in the first five minutes, I’ll hazard asking him about that.