Blog entries tagged with "damian conway"

At perl mongers tonight Damian gave a talk on dead languages with the following examples:

• An implementation of the game of life in Lisp where the field was implemented as a list that wrapped around to form a toriod;
• How to calculate Pi in postscript using the Buffon’s needle technique;
• Declaratively representing a finite state machine that can calculate the price of fish in C++;
• How SPECS, an attempt to improve the syntax of C++, failed miserably once they decided to use ‘:=’ (colon equals) for assignments;
• and finally the development of Lingua::Romana::Perligata which allows perl programs to be written in Latin.

This was the largest attendance at a perl mongers that I have ever seen with some people missing out on a seat…

… but in a good way.

Today was my first of four days with Damian Conway. Today was the first day of Advanced Module Interface Techniques and so far he as led us through the design and some of the implementation of ‘magic’ (aka sufficiently advanced technology) modules such as Perl6::Say (stunningly simple) and Contextual::Return (simple to use, mind bending to understand the implementation).

Tomorrow will be the second day of this course which is then followed by The Productive Programmer and Advanced Technical Presentation Techniques (one day each).

Damian will also be giving his “Fun with Dead Languages” talk at Melbourne Perl Mongers this Wednesday…

Today was the first of two days of having Damian Conway in at work to present his Perl Best Practice course.

So far most of what we had been arguing over at work for at least the last six months was ratified by Damian.

Damian Conway‘s Advanced Object-Oriented Perl course is excellent and now I can’t wait until the end of May when we will be getting him back again, but that time for Perl Best Practice.

The best thing about Damian’s courses is that we can delve deep down into some very elegant and powerfull constructs that have practical applications. Right now I want to write a class that uses a closure to implement a flyweight pattern in order to enforce data encapsulation…

I also want to do his Advanced Module Development Techniques, or as Damian referred to it "Scary Perl", course…

Today I went into the city, with a couple of people from work, to attend a two hour talk by Damian Conway on Perl 6.

It was very interesting and a tad depressing. In the sense that there are all these cool new things and a lot of annoyances removed but I went back to work and continued programming in Perl 5…

Today at work we had Damian Conway in to present his Understanding Regular Expressions course. Overall it was good even though we only covered half of the material. This was because Damian would often talk about fundamental aspects of Perl related to his examples. So while that detracted from the regular expressions it added a great deal more.

A some stage we need to do his Perl Best Practice course, assuming he has finished planning it…

The course also brought back memories of having Damian as my lecturer for a couple of subjects back in my early years of university. His Object Oriented Perl book also brings back memories of similar concepts, except in C++ back then. I must finish reading it a some stage…