Yet Another Perl Conference - Canada 140
minaguib writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Ottawa, Canada May 15th and 16th. Pre-Registration is now open and the calendar is not completely finalized, as they are still accepting presenter entries. This is a great way to get involved either as a presenter or an attendee."
woo hoo! (Score:1)
Re:woo hoo! (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe you should enroll in some English classes at that univeristy of yours.
Kleedrac
Re:woo hoo! (Score:2)
Re:woo hoo! (Score:2, Informative)
OSW,
the GCC Summit [gccsummit.org], and the Kernel Summit (see http://lwn.net/Articles/3467/ ). Other stuff too.
Re:woo hoo! (Score:1)
Woo Us.
Depressionary Travel Expenses (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Depressionary Travel Expenses (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depressionary Travel Expenses (Score:2)
There are some industries not doing so well -- but I wouldn't count the tech sector as one of them, anymore.
YAPAYAPC (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:2)
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:2)
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:1)
I mean look at his username it's eggtroll for pete's sake, and just the fact that he said doom 3 should be written in vb says something. As the other people have already said, he's merarly showing how the slashdot moderator works.
(also another note to moderators I've seen: if your replying to someone else's off topic post, then it's not an off-topic post, Thank you)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:2)
YHBT [catb.org]. YHL. HAND.
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:2)
Has been fixed in PHP and is now the default.
You can at least fake function overloading in perl
You can with PHP as well. PHP has function pointers, makes this easy.
No attempt at typing, at all.
That's a feature of both languages. They're just loosely typed languages. I suspect the reasoning is that scripts aren't suppose to be doing anything large and complex, so the auto typing should screw up anything, just guessing.
No ability to compile to any form of byte-code or machine-code
There are several opcode caches for PHP http://www.turcksoft.com/en/e_mmc.htm [turcksoft.com]
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that whenever someone mentions Perl, everyone has to mention how superior insert favourite language is. Does everyone feel that threatened by Perl? Do that many people hate Perl that much?
I use Perl because it lets me get the job done with little or no hassle. I like the TMTOWTDI nature of Perl, and Perl had one of the best [apache.org] support [pm.org] communities [perlmonks.org] out there. There is a huge public codebase [cpan.org] that you can draw from. And if you are building websites, there is a plethora of application frameworks and templating languages to choose from (HTML::Mason, Apache::ASP, OpenInteract, CGI::Application, AxKit, Embperl, Apache::PageKit, Template Toolkit, HTML::Template just to name a few).
What really annoys me is most of the time the complaints made against Perl are completely unfounded (like the claims made by the parent post). If someone wants me to refute the complaints made about Perl in the parent post I can, but for now I'll just end my rant here...
If you haven't used Perl before, try it, it's good!
JSP (Score:4, Informative)
I'll bite. Plus I'll throw another contender into the ring even.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl.
Same here, there are cases where PHP works better than JSP. Very small, quick and dirty web scripts come to mind.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Power and ease of use, is very often at odds. This is not always the case, but very often that's the trade-off you get with languages. Deal with it. Perl, along with JSP and other application servers give you many ways to do what is *apparently* the same thing. For example in many cases you may be able to get away with using "|", "||", or "or" in exactly the same statement and get what is to you the same effect ( if you don't care about bitwise operation or presedence).
Nice to see you got your web application up and running so quickly. Now try to connection pooling ( php persistant connections are db specific, ldap and less popular dbs don't get it ), or any other optimizations where you optimize the generation or retrival of variables or other resources by limiting that operation to once per session.
Ever wonder why so many slashdoted sites say "max connections in mysql reached"? Because often every hit is creating and closing a connection to the database. It's difficult to do any session scope or application scope optimizations using PHP. Is there a variable you need once per user session? Tough, you have to get it from the DB each hit, or store it in the URL, eg.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Java vs. PHP's OO. Hmmm.... Grap a design pattern textbook and try implementing any non trivial pattern in PHP. PHP OO is an afterthought, and it shows.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.)
ODBC
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used.
Hah! Try a real web application. There standard PHP engine does not have an opcode optimizer. Every hit to your site is compile. While most application servers come with opcode optimizations by default. Your site is compiled on startup or on the first hit only. Afterwards the in memory code is executed. Even if you use a PHP opcode optimizer, it would be interesting to see PHP vs Tomcat. My money's on Tomcat.
Portability.
JAVA. Nuff said. There's isn't 20 different dependent libraries at compile time, or realizing that you need to recompile PHP because you don't have PDF lib support built in. That's suppose to change soon, I hear, but until then.
Graphics
Java2D
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc.
Check out java.util .
PHP alright, but isn't all that hot. I still use PHP for small scripts that few people use ( eg. scripts to add/del IMAP or LDAP users for instance which only a small number of admins use), but the truth is most application servers would eat its lunch.
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl (Score:2, Informative)
What is it good for? (Score:2, Informative)
My question, however, is what are the strengths of Perl? And is it well suited for manipulating information in a database?
Re:What is it good for? (Score:1)
Much of genetics sequencing (the small chunks) and Wall Street uses PERL to parse their data (RegExp!!).
However, the main backbone is still often C because it's just simply the fastest.
Re:What is it good for? (Score:3, Informative)
Perl has some fantastic regex support.
www.cpan.org [Central Perl Archive Network] has Perl modules for almost everything you need it for.
To talk to a SQL handling RDBMS,
perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBI'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBD::DBtype'
DBI is like ODBC, a wrapper over DBMS specific drivers.
If you want to talk to a Directory server, install Net::LDAP.
Perl greatest strength is its flexibility, and tis weakness as well. It takes some effort to write good code in Perl, because it is so easy to write very bad unmaintainable Perl code. You need to discipline yourself when writing Perl.
Re:What is it good for? (Score:2)
Re:What is it good for? (Score:1)
It finally depends on the quality of the programming team, which designs and implements the program.
I am an administrator primarily, with enough knowledge of code to know buggy programs.
Writing code is easy, writing good code is hard.
I prefer to learn more than one language, and use the right tool for the right job.
I have no desire to implement graphics in C, or high performance on low memory systems in Java.
Perl is great for text processing, for database work, but not for numeric manipulation.
IDEs are nice for doing user interfaces (unless the user is a poweruser/admin, in which case, shell access has to be available for piping data around.)
Finally, it boils down to the right tool for the right job, and one language does not fit all requirements.
And programmer discipline is always needed for good code.
Re:What is it good for? (Score:2)
I didn't mean to imply that your summary of perl's strength/weaknesses was a bad job. For one thing, you point out that it is indeed possible to use discipline in developing perl code, something that many of it's detractors seem to miss.
And as for that "right tool for the job" philsophy, that's another cliche I'm a little tired of, though I don't know that I really want to get into it... briefly there is no "right tool": e.g. your opinion that perl isn't the best for numeric work probably has some technical merits, but if you've got a shop full of perl programmers, and it turns out you need to do some numeric crunching, the "right thing to do" might be to use the "wrong" tool.
Re:What is it good for? (Score:1)
As for the right tool, TMTOWTDI
Use the tool you know works. I would rather that programmers know more than one language, and the strengths and weaknesses o the language.
Just because you can do everything in sendmail.cf macros, does not mean you should. Different languages exist for a reason, and the developer should be able to judge what best fits the situation.
Re:What is it good for? (Score:1)
Perl is amazingly fast for text manipulation - both in development and execution time. To me, the strengths are ease of development (obviously), and the availability of a whole spectrum of modules that run natively.
O'Reilly: Perl Conference for System Admins. (Score:2, Funny)
Hope I can cross the border (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hope I can cross the border (Score:2)
No worries. That's just the ones who continuously misspent their names on their resumes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Perl vs. Python. (Score:2)
PHP: I suppose if you need to mix code w/ html, this is as good or bad a way as any. But I don't do that (I have that luxury, I code by myself and needn't accomodate webmasturbators).
As others have said, web or non-web, the shortest path between 'need/want' and 'have' is often a perl script. Pretty much anything you want to do (and a lot that you would never even think of doing) is on CPAN.
Re:Perl vs. Python. (Score:1)
Re:Perl vs. Python. (Score:2)
I agree with your assessment of CPAN. The range is pretty much unequaled anywhere. The python analog looks pretty weak in comparison. Still, there's only time in the way.
Re:Perl vs. Python. (Score:1)
I'd never heard of pike [ida.liu.se]. I'm not sure if it's resemblance to C would be comfortable or confusing. The claim as to speed is interesting. The website is being very slow, though, so I haven't seen much.
And what's with the 4 letter 'P' words for languages these days? Back in my day, we had 'B', which begat 'C', and that was good enough for us!
Why can't get we a conferance... (Score:2)
Re:Why can't get we a conferance... (Score:1)
Ironically, I also learnt Perl while living in Sydenham Hall using a book from the Taylor Library
Re:Why can't get we a conferance... (Score:2)
I remember people were saying that about London UK not so many years ago. That was back in 2000. Then my fellow London.pm members got their act together and organised one! And that was YAPC::Europe, and the rest is history as they like to say.
Of course, they got help from YAS [yetanother.org]. YAS is Yet Another Society designed to help people, amongst other things, set up their own conferences.
So, if there's no conference near you...why not try and hold your own? From what I saw, it wasn't easy, but everyone I know that was involved had a hell of a lot of fun.
Void marketing scheme? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Void marketing scheme? (Score:1)
Re:Void marketing scheme? (Score:2)
Re:Void marketing scheme? (Score:3, Informative)
These nefarious groups indeed seem to be as thick as theives. But if a firm like ExitCertified is devoting their time, office space, and personnel to so much in the local OSS/programming communities, haven't they earned the respect of our community? Just because they're an active company dosen't mean they're all bad. I wouldn't worry about the vacancies either; speakers were still being lined up for the local Open Source Weekend/Business Of Open Source Conference (BOSS) held a few weeks ago in the city and look who showed up [www.osw.ca].
Hrmm (Score:2)
Canadian Pearl Conference (Score:1)
Re:Canadian Pearl Conference (Score:1)
Wait a second... (Score:4, Funny)
That would explain so many things on so many levels.
I wonder what the Perl syntax for "... eh?" is...
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2, Funny)
"eh?" is the official pronunciation of the ";" character.
Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't actually know Perl, but my guess would be @#!$&^%eh!@#$@$*&
Re:Wait a second... (Score:1)
There is no such word as _the_ in Perl. TMOWTDI.
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2)
open(FH, 'file') or die;
print FH "test\n" or die;
close FH or die;
This code is much simpler in a language (like Python) that throws an exception when something goes wrong rather expecting you to remember to check the return value every single time.
(Yeah yeah I know the quotation: 'failing to open a file is hardly exceptional'. I submit that what's truly exceptional is the time when you don't want to throw an error on opening a file but instead handle the problem at the same level. It's that less common case that should require extra code, not the more common case of 'if the file couldn't be opened, throw an exception and let the caller handle it if he wants'.)
No One Will Remain Depressed In My Presence! (Score:2, Offtopic)
You must see me eat a donut. It's remarkable.
Click the link below.
Did we forget about the florida one? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.yapc.org/America/venue.shtml
They didn't list it on the "Seeing Boca Raton" section, but there are other things to do in the Boca area, such FLUX (Florida Linux Users eXchange - http://www.flux.org/) and the 2600 meeting (not to mention Sawgrass Mills Mall which is an attraction all it's own - just come on a friday night).
Quit Bitchin (Score:2)
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Re:Quit Bitchin (Score:3, Informative)
You haven't been watching the exchange rate recently, have you? 12 months ago, 1 U.S. dollar was worth $1.60 Canadian, but my last exchange occurred at the rate of $1.47, and the U.S. dollar is still dropping in value.
Whoever is in charge of the dollar policy in the U.S. recently changed. The previous guy was an advocate of a strong U.S. dollar (I'm not sure why), but the new guy realizes that was hurting U.S. exports, so you can expect the rate to settle somewhere around $1.35 to $1.40 after the dust settles. That would at least bring it inline with purchasing power on both sides of the border.
It will also bring comparative salaries more inline on both sides, so it might slow down the "brain drain" of Canadian talent to the U.S.
Perl shmerl (Score:1, Flamebait)
Whew! (Score:3, Funny)
And I was going to go as a sharpshooter on the roof, but this is an even better idea!
Perl in Canada (Score:3, Funny)
Re:fp (Score:1)
Re:PERL is a waste of time (Score:1)
Also when you do OO in a non OO language you are enforcing the OO only through convention. If someone else works on your code they can make a real mess by breaking encapsulation and other such non-OO practises
Re:PERL is a waste of time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perl IS a waste of time (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Perl IS a waste of time (Score:1, Funny)
Re:PERL is a waste of time (Score:2)
Re:First Hooty Post! (Score:1)
Hooty rules! Ninnle sucks!
Re:Not off-topic fucking moderators (Score:1)
-russ