“It used to be called simply the Perl Conference. The first
was in 1997, and the second was last year, both in San Jose,
California. This year it morphed into something much bigger: a
multi-track open source convention featuring parallel programs
for:
- Perl
- Python
- Linux
- Apache
- sendmail
- Tcl/Tk
- open source business issues”
“The regular conferences on Monday and Tuesday were preceded by
a weekend of tutorials. I got there in time to catch Mark-Jason
Dominus’ “Tricks of the Wizards.” It was all about globs, ties,
closures, and other stuff that — frighteningly — I more or less
understand after years of Perl apprenticeship. What I liked most,
though, was the state-machine example.”
“The machine in question was an NNTP server, and the states
modeled were those involved in the NNTP client/server command
protocol. The state machine was represented as — what else? — a
Perl hashtable. A very clean, elegant demonstration of how Perl
likes to blur the boundary between code and data, and why that’s
useful.”