Re: PHP community
On 16/01/2013 15:08, gvim wrote: PHP UK (22nd Feb.): £380 London Perl Workshop: £0 'nuff said. Wow, perl is so unpopular they have to give away places to get people to a conference. or Wow, the demand for PHP conferences is so high people are willing to pay quite a lot to go. I have no idea what you're trying to say but I suspect that wasn't it.
Re: PHP community
On 17 Jan 2013, at 09:57, Kieren Diment wrote: On 17/01/2013, at 2:08 AM, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: PHP UK (22nd Feb.): £380 London Perl Workshop: £0 'nuff said. Apparently not. Having been part of the teams that organized the first YAPC::Europe and first LPW there is a good reason for it being free or in the case of YAPC as cheap as possible. Kevin Lenzo had done the first YAPC as an alternative to expensive conferences, especially thinking of students and/or poorer open source hackers. The phrase Inclusive not exclusive I remember being used a lot. And that tradition has stuck and influenced LPW, and it isn't just for moral reasons alone - if you run an event where nobody is profiting you tend to get the goodwill of groups and people like Westminster University (who have supported other open source events) and companies like O'Reilly - apologies for skipping the full list of sponsors. And of course it means you have the freedom to just say no to commercial talks from sponsors - which is the reason YAPC::Europe has auctions ;-). I think its great that there is a paid for PHP event, i'm sure a lot of people will go along and learn a lot (i'm so avoiding making a joke here) and thats great, but i'm quite proud that London.pm 13 years on has kept the seem moral objective of being accessible. G.
Re: PHP community
On 16 Jan 2013, at 16:25, Daniel de Oliveira Mantovani daniel.oliveira.mantov...@gmail.com wrote: [...] When you are dealing with dumb people like PHP dev's you can write whatever you want and do money, is like church. This sentence no sense. You appear to be attacking PHP developers. Sturgeon's Law applies to PHP and Perl developers alike. The only reason you're seeing a lot of terrible PHP in the wild because it's a wildly popular language with a low barrier to entry. I have seen many horrific things done in Perl by people who thought they were smarter than they actually were. (See Dunning-Kruger effect.) In the specific example I have in mind, the code would have been a whole lot less broken if it was written in PHP instead because the more restrictive language wouldn't have encouraged the author to try something quite so silly. It would have also performed better. This is why Java is popular amongst people herding middling developers. It won't let the buggers create a mixin of java.arms.Bullet and java.legs.Foot :)
Re: PHP community
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 03:08:39PM +, gvim wrote: PHP UK (22nd Feb.): £380 London Perl Workshop: £0 With airfare, hotel and dinner, my visits to LWP can easily exceed 380 pounds. (Yeah, I know, it *can* be done in less) And for YAPC::* visits, conference fees are dwarved by transportation costs and hotel fees. I'm pretty sure there are quite a number of people that will have had a poor conference if their bar tab was less than the conference fee. Low conference fees are really useful if you're aiming at the local market, and aiming for young people at the start of their career. That wasn't the Perl conference demographic back in 1999 when the first YAPCs and workshops started, and it hasn't changed much since. And just in case there's anyone saying but I'm stuck in a low paid job and I can't afford paying a conference fee, I've a couple of dozen job positions we'd like to fill this quarter. Contact me. Abigail
Re: PHP community
On 17 Jan 2013, at 11:04, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: Sturgeon's Law applies to PHP and Perl developers alike. The only reason you're seeing a lot of terrible PHP in the wild because it's a wildly popular language with a low barrier to entry. Which latter is also true of Perl outside the echo chamber.
Re: PHP community
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:04:00AM +, Peter Corlett wrote: On 16 Jan 2013, at 16:25, Daniel de Oliveira Mantovani daniel.oliveira.mantov...@gmail.com wrote: When you are dealing with dumb people like PHP dev's you can write whatever you want and do money, is like church. This sentence no sense. It makes perfect sense, once you realise that Daniel's first language ain't English, and that in Romance languages 'do' and 'make' are sometimes (often? always?) the same verb. An inability to see past one's own mother tongue is just as limiting, harmful, and irritating to others in human languages as in programming languages. -- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla.
Re: PHP community
On 17 January 2013 09:46, Simon Wilcox es...@ourshack.com wrote: On 16/01/2013 15:08, gvim wrote: PHP UK (22nd Feb.): £380 London Perl Workshop: £0 'nuff said. Wow, perl is so unpopular they have to give away places to get people to a conference. or Wow, the demand for PHP conferences is so high people are willing to pay quite a lot to go. I have no idea what you're trying to say but I suspect that wasn't it. If the demand for PHP conferences is much higher than for Perl, how do you explain that ?: http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Perl%2C+Python%2C+Php%2C+Ruby It looks to me that Perl AND PHP are both losing momentum in the same proportion, Perl remaining significantly more popular than PHP on the US job market. A quick google trends comparison shows exactly the same downward trend, although here it seems people are significantly googling PHP much much more than Perl. http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=php%2C%20perl%2C%20python%2C%20rubycmpt=q One interesting thing to notice is that although there's more job offers in Perl, PHP wins the google search contest (and some people are willing to pay £380 to go to a PHP conference). I don't really know what conclusion this should lead to. Another one is while job market demand for Python and Ruby are growing (not rapidly though), their search volume stays flat. -- Jerome Eteve. jerome.et...@gmail.com
Re: PHP community
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Jérôme Étévé jerome.et...@gmail.comwrote: , Perl remaining significantly more popular than PHP on the US job market. I'm probably missing something (it's been a long day) but I don't really understand that graph. If I click on the 'Perl jobs' link it returns ~ 41,000 jobs and if I click on the 'PHP jobs' link it returns ~ 281,000 jobs.
Re: PHP community
Having been part of the teams that organized the first YAPC::Europe and first LPW there is a good reason for it being free or in the case of YAPC as cheap as possible. Kevin Lenzo had done the first YAPC as an alternative to expensive conferences, especially thinking of students and/or poorer open source hackers. The phrase Inclusive not exclusive I remember being used a lot. Yes, IIRC TPC was very expensive and YAPC was the cool alternative ~ I'd never have gone to TPC but YAPC literally brought me full swing into the Perl community, and I think it led to a lot of great Open Source and community development, helped CPAN become what it's become etc. I hope we haven't forgotten all this, and just become begrudging elitists, in love with Perl for no good reason
Re: PHP community
On 17/01/2013 16:21, Jérôme Étévé wrote: On 17 January 2013 09:46, Simon Wilcox es...@ourshack.com wrote: On 16/01/2013 15:08, gvim wrote: PHP UK (22nd Feb.): £380 London Perl Workshop: £0 'nuff said. Wow, perl is so unpopular they have to give away places to get people to a conference. or Wow, the demand for PHP conferences is so high people are willing to pay quite a lot to go. I have no idea what you're trying to say but I suspect that wasn't it. If the demand for PHP conferences is much higher than for Perl, how do you explain that ?: [snip] I don't - since the OP is posting to a perl list, I imagine they intended the comparison to be in perl's favour so I was merely posting some contrary interpretations. I look forward to hearing the point the OP was trying to make. S.
Re: PHP community
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:35:28AM +, Greg McCarroll said: And that tradition has stuck and influenced LPW, and it isn't just for moral reasons alone - if you run an event where nobody is profiting you tend to get the goodwill of groups and people like Westminster University (who have supported other open source events) and companies like O'Reilly - apologies for skipping the full list of sponsors. There's also another very good reason the LPW was free ... it was a lot easier that way. No need to set up a separate bank account, being free manages expectations (no coffee, food, tshirts or wifi - coffee and food potentially bringing extra health and safety regulation). Interestingly I did get people asking that it be more expensive to make it easier to justify to their bosses. Particularly at banking institutions. One way I got round that was to essentially sell them a Platinum Sponsorship deal or some other shennanigans ... the company sponsors for say 500 pounds, that goes straight behind the bar for the post conference social and as a reward for sponsoring the company gets 5 free places. Another thing we did was to get three banks to bring over a well known Face from the community. Each of the banks paid for a day of training and then the face did a free talk at LPW. We also all chipped in and paid for someone to come over once. I started writing up some thoughts about free conferences here many years ago http://thegestalt.org/simon/guerilla_conference_organising.txt never really finished them though.
