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Agenda

On 15 September, 2005, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:

Location: Tel-Aviv University

Report

  1. Ran Eilam
  2. Gabor Szabo
  3. Oded S. Resnik
  4. Kate Delikat
  5. Thomas Maier
  6. Miki Eden
  7. Offer Kaye
  8. Shlomi Fish
  9. Yuval Yaari
  10. Beni Cherniavsky
  11. Uri Bruck
  12. Pinkhas Nisanov
  13. Oren Izmirli
  14. Gaal Yahas
  15. Ronen Shachar

Can't beat the university surrounding. It is much more inspiring to talk Perl and eat burekas when surrounded by live satellite imagery and cases with moon rocks, than when surrounded with aging yellow-pages books. And there was plenty of fine refreshments for all.

After a long absence from these meetings, it was easy to remember why I started coming here in the first place.

1st talk was about "Visual Perl/Tk". A beginner oriented tool for building Tk GUIs visually. He built it. A reasonably convincing argument was made about the need for such a tool. Then we saw a nice demo. The code generated looks excellent. There is limited support for theming. I especially liked the various types of online help he showed- there is an internal help area where tips are shown, and you get external POD windows. Great for learning PerlTk.

He was thinking of round trip code generation and other stuff, but then we got into a long session of RTL unicode hacking in Tk. The words "locale", "UTF8", and "BIDI" were thrown around, and strange characters appeared on the screen. This specific topic seems to be a major obsession with several mongers. It keeps appearing in every meeting. Or it could be just coincidence.

Then came Gaal's talk about Perl6 for Perl5 people. The talk was great and left us with an appetite for more of the same. Each slide had some Perl5 vs. Perl6 code. The Pugs interpreter was used for demos and answering the many questions that were asked. He specifically focused on existing Pelr5 pains and their solution. He could have ranted about the sexier features of Perl6 (continuations, roles, etc.), but the approach he took was much better.

Migo and others asked some difficult questions, which always started with "but can I do...?". As expected the answer was always yes. Offer focused on questions of the type "but can I do ... as I did in Perl5?". Again the answers were always yes.

Secondary sigils, adverbial modifiers, topicalization, hyper operators, the splat operator...

Some notable quotes:

"The behavior in this case is well defined, or will be well defined" "Perl code that has MAGNIVUT (stealing quality)" "Perl5, when seen in this way, is slightly clunky"

He promised a talk about the Perl6 project. I can hardly wait.

Then came the bomb: Larry Wall and Autrijus Tang are coming to the next YAPC in Israel.

Then we went to the coffee house, and there too talked about Perl.

See you next time.

This meeting summary was written by Ran Eilam.