More trailing-edge con watching. I’m spending more time observing the audience than the speakers, trying to overhear conversations that will give me a wider view of what’s happening here. You can’t keep track of everything, though. I’m most conscious of what I’ve missed. I’ve lost contact with the “whither open source in the enterprise” attendees – apart from Chris diBona, who is asking business model questions everywhere. The only bit of the corporate world I’ve heard about was various agog folk talking about a blistering Morgan Stanley talk on their internal Perl use. They described an amazing CPAN archive they maintain which has all the previous versions of the 280-so modules they use, all versioned so that their systems always use mods that are guaranteed to work with it. Plus all kinds of scary international desktop synchronisation over AFS. “They maintain a Perl system for 15000 programmers that we can’t keep going for ten”, said one guy.
I missed the Ruby folk too, much to my annoyance. They were a bit the underdogs at the conference, but everyone liked them. Most of the guru-level Perl coders admitted to messing around with Ruby for fun. You can see a few Ruby ideas percolating into Perl6.
One of the big themes for me was hearing the Perl guys wanting to help out everyone else, whether the other languages wanted them or not. That fits in with what’s best described as the irrational exuberance of the Perlees. They run around like big slobbering St Bernards, knocking over the quietly studious Python guys and barging into the BOFs, barking and licking people whenever they found them. They really, really want everyone else to have a CPAN, for instance. That’s one of the aims of the freepan project.
Freepan, along with FIT and YAML, is a Brian “ingy” Ingerson project. Looking back through the archives, he’s always been fairly ubiquitous at OSCON, but he was very much in the epicenter of my OSCON this year. He’s not necessarily the brains behind every good idea here, but he’s usually a degree of separation away from it.
I think the next few weeks trackings will all come from here.