“Last week I attended my first O’Reilly Open Source Software/
Perl Convention at the Monterey Conference Center. The first two
days featured in-depth tutorials; the second two, conference
sessions and the exposition booths. Sprinkle in some keynote
addresses and some informal Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and you’ve
got the makings of a good show….”
“The tutorials and conferences were given by some of the
most knowledgeable people in the business. In other words, Tom
Christiansen teaches about Perl; Eric Allman teaches about
Sendmail; Eric Raymond talks about hacking memes, etc. Many
other highly esteemed names from the open source community were
also in attendance. I attended Tom Christiansen’s and Mark-Jason
Dominus’ advanced Perl tutorials. The Birds-of-a-Feather sessions
in the evenings were very casual and intimate, filled with dialog.
Overall, the program was rich and diverse, with general topics like
State of… sessions on Python, BSDs, PHP, Mozilla, etc., and some
very specific topics like Parse::Vipar, an IDE for writing
parsers.”
“Reminisces of the past and yearnings for the future were
depicted during keynote speeches. Andy Hertzfeld gave Tuesday’s
keynote address, looking back along the road we’ve travelled. Larry
Wall followed on Wednesday with the “State of the Onion” Perl
address. On Thursday, Tim O’Reilly with Gregory Benford, an
astrophysicist/science fiction author, peered into the crystal ball
of things to come.”