Hi all, here are my impressions and thoughts from the last Tel Aviv Perl Mongers in no particular order:
1. Miss Ferret's presentation about Typography was captivating, fun, and funny, but I kinda felt that I had already known most of what she said there already by intuition. However, now I know that I was right. :-) I'm looking forward for her future talks, if there will be. 2. On the way to the grocery store I told Sawyer that I will kill Ran if he doesn't make his slides available this time. (Or outsource the dirty job to a hired Assassin or some בן-בליעל - I wonder if offshore outsourcing will work in this case ;-)). Ran escaped by not using any slides today and just showing source code. On the other hand, he said something that we shouldn't provide screencasts and/or video recordings because that way people won't want to attend the physical meetings. I think that's the wrong way to think about it, because by giving videos, screencasts, audio recordings, transcripts or whatever, we are actually publicising our meetings and creating buzz around them. It's like those artists who distribute their songs or even entire albums online (or even just expect them to be watched on youtube, torrented, etc.) and then go on tours, and earn a lot of money from selling tickets, swag, etc. As I read on the Creative Commons blog once, the main threat for an artist (or a club for that matter) is not piracy - it's obscurity. 3. One thing I disliked about Ran's code is the overuse of Roles. For crying out loud, he even a point was a role. http://search.cpan.org/~mstrout/ complained about RoR that it was originally written by a PHP programmer who learned Ruby, said "Classes… shiny!!" and then went to overuse them. In a similar way, on a recent job, our CTO was impressed by git's cheap and convenient branching capability, and decided on implementing every feature or bug on a separate branch, which was overusing this (otherwise great) feature of git. So I think now Ran kinda said "Roles… shiny!!". 4. I referenced what Larry Wall said here: http://xrl.us/bhks6t : <blockquote> I think that ordinary people dislike abstraction. That's because I dislike abstraction and I think I'm ordinary. (laughter) I might be wrong about that, but I don't know. </blockquote> Naturally, in this case, I think that writing things directly using SDL is not such a good idea, because it's very low-level and inconvenient, but you should treat such a library as an API and not an abstraction. Some of the most popular CPAN modules are APIs: * http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/ * http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-LibXML/ * http://search.cpan.org/search?query=json&mode=all * http://search.cpan.org/dist/GD/ Etc. etc. There are also many meta-syntactic or abstraction modules (such as Coro, Moose, Autobox, Class-Accessor, Error.pm->Try::Tiny, etc. etc.) but these are more controversial, in part because people feel that they'd rather stick to plain-old Perl. I feel that one of the thing that killed languages such as Common Lisp in most everyday use (see: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) is that the core language is not usable as is, and was meant as a base to build abstractions upon abstractions above it. No one has the energy to do that. 5. We didn't stay to the café eventually and instead each one of us went on their way. I escorted some people on their way to the train (could not get a ride) and then went on to cross the bridge and caught a bus. 6. Ido's presentation about Ruby for Perl programmers was good. It reminded me of szabgab's presentations about Perl 6 of showing many small and trivial things that were very different but still cool. 7. Sawyer was good as usual with his "use" vs. "require". Hopefully the slides will be online. 8. We discussed XML vs. JSON vs. YAML for configuration file format. I mentioned http://search.cpan.org/dist/Config-Settings/ which was an upcoming competitor to Config-General (user-friendly but quirky and buggy) and to YAML (positively huge, complicated and quirky) and it seemed very nice when I read its syntax description. So I would recommend using that. I mentioned that while XML usually sucks for configuration file formats, it is a good choice for a case where you have something like: [XML] <saying character="David">Goliath: I'm going to kill you in the name of <a xlink:href="http://wikip.tld/the-lord";>the LORD</a> all mighty and all powerful</saying> [/XML] Here, it is mostly based on text and uses text and also sub-parts of the text are marked in a different markup. People showed me how they encoded this as S- expressions, but I might as well encode everything using 1's and 0's or program everything using NAND gates. For http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/XML-Grammar/Fiction/ I defined several well-formed and strict plaintext-based grammars (with some embedded XML-like tags), and then converted them into a custom XML format, which in turn is translated using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT stylesheets into XHTML, DocBook/XML and/or XSL-FO. "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirection ). XML-Grammar-Fortune is maintained by using XML directly, and it's OK so far, and naturally, I don't think that HTML/XHTML or DocBook/XML can be effectively written using YAML, JSON or S- expressions. Everything has its place in the world. 9. Insert your thoughts here. ------------------------------ BTW, my sister told me of this movie, whose title at least may appeal to many computer geeks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code It's a techno-thriller, and seems interesting based on the plot summary on the wikipedia, and is already in theatres in Israel. My quote at the bottom is also appropriate. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris/etc. Facts - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/ I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code. -- Unknown Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
