| February Meeting »
Highlights from the St. Louis Perl Mongers meeting on Wed, Jan 17, 2007:
By The Management | January 29, 2007
We’ve decided to post meeting highlights on the web for those who could not make it. Here’s the first edition.
Head count: 9. Lots of people said they always plan to come, but remember too late, and the email reminders helped. Everyone who spoke up said that automated email reminders would help. The suggested times were: 1 week ahead, two days before, and the day-of.
We went to Mangia, an Italian restaurant and 3am bar with wireless and a big non-smoking section, and good beer selection. A few people suggested that hopping around is good and fun, while others said changing locations regularly would discourage people from building a habit of coming. The long table and restaurant atmosphere was less than ideal, but worked. One attendee said he knows the owners, and would check into access to their downstairs area.
Ben Oberkfell showed a bit of the new web site, and we discussed briefly the requirements for “going live” with it. There was general consensus that sooner was more important than better, and that moving the mailing list was the only critical criteria before switching the DNS. After that, integrating the wiki with the CMS (both already installed) and mailman would be nice, so a single signup could get people into all systems.
Bill Odom (our hero and president of the Perl Foundation) just left Monsanto for Social Text. Those of us who work on the non-corporate side of biology applauded. Then we consoled him for having to work with Ingy.
Steve Pritchard told us about his work to package CPAN modules as rpms for Red Hat. We talked about the ease and difficulty of using the CPAN module to install things outside the Linux distro’s packaging system. We discussed PAR, the Perl equivalent to Java’s JAR.
There was discussion about tank theft, and a YouTube video of the famous tank/police care chase was shown. The group was non unanimous on whether the tank was driving backwards the entire time, nor were we unanimous on the qualifications of the driver.
Mixing operations systems was discussed quite a bit, and several people showed-off their Macs running Ubuntu and XP in parallel, with “Parallels”. Everyone who spoke up thought it was cool, and worth the cost for the software if you have a Mac.
Everyone wondered why they weren’t on a beach in Mexico like Michelle.
People asked provocative questions of Bill Odom about Perl 6 and Parrot, as though it’s his fault those projects are taking a long time. Bill talked about the great progress made over the last six months, and how a lofty goal deserves a longer time table. Questions were asked about the status of compiler tools, the latest release of Parrot, and targeting the JVM/CLR.
There was discussion of how languages and communities like Perl, Ruby, Java, etc. differ, and there were two major opinions. The first was that Ruby and Perl have more in common than they do differences, and we should look at those Ruby programmers like cousins. The other was that since Ruby is new and trying to make a name for itself, Ruby lovers seem to prefer to distinguish themselves rather than associate with “the mother language”. Java and .NET communities were discussed, and it was generally considered that smart innovators were hard to find in the mix of follow-alongs, and that the “users groups” had the feel of “still being at work”. Half of the group was excited about visiting the Ruby group’s meeting, while the other half though those guys would be too full of themselves to bother visiting.
Many people said that that last talk by Andy Lester was great, and wanted more of that sort of thing. Many people also said that having planned talks all the time discourages the real juicy discourse we were having. Nearly everyone agreed that the ability to show off something easily when it comes up spontaneously would be great, and wished we had a marker board and projector.
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