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Agenda

On 09 October, 2003, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:

Location:

Report

  1. Damian Monafo
  2. Gabor Szabo
  3. Hezi Golan
  4. Itzik Lerner
  5. Kobi Susson
  6. Mikhael Goikhman
  7. Oded Resnik
  8. Offer Kaye
  9. Pinkhas Nisanov
  10. Ran Eilam
  11. Ran Tene
  12. Ronen Kfir
  13. Shaul Karl
  14. Shlomi Fish
  15. Thomas Maier
  16. Yehuda Berlinger
  17. Yoni Monafo

The first lecture, about the POD::Index project, started at 19:00 sharp. The lecturer was Yehuda Berlinger. Yehuda talked about the project's goal, target audience, existing tools and what was done and what was still left to be done (i.e. "todo"). At the end, some people asked questions and there was some discussion regarding the way the search was implemented, but I at least got the feeling that everyone agreed this was a worthwhile project.

After Yehuda was done Gabor got up and gave some more background on the project and the wx GUI and answered some more questions about it. Personally I thought it was very interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product on CPAN...

The next lecture was given by Mikhael Goikhman, and was titled "Ruby for Perl Programmers". Mikhael started out by introducing this fascinating new language, giving its highlights and some features, then continued by showing a simple Ruby program. From there the lecture dived into more details, and if you are interested the entire lecture notes can be found online so you can read them for yourselves (see below for the link).

I guess the most interesting thing for me was that Mikhael showed clearly how Ruby was derived mainly from Perl, this later led to an observation by Gabor that Perl 6 was meant mainly as Perl's response to Ruby. It seems that just as Ruby borrowed many of its features from Perl, Perl 6 will borrow back some good ideas from Ruby. This to my mind shows one of the best features of open source projects, the ability to cross-pollinate with other projects and enhance both in the process. It will be very interesting to see in the future which language comes out a favourite of programmers, but in any case both programmers and users will I'm sure come out winners from this healthy competition between the two languages.

Anyway, getting back to the meeting review, because the lecture was pretty long we stopped in the middle for a 10 minute break and continued at 20:45. Some people left both during the first part of the lecture and more left during the break, so that after the break we remained 10 people- still a respectful number. Mikhael managed to barely wrap up the last slides at 21:45, when we had to close up the meeting and clear the building. Ran Eilam brought up the idea of going to a pub, but because this was unplanned we decided to postpone the pub to the next meeting, with the understanding that it would be announced in the mailing list in advance that this was the plan, so that people could plan accordingly.

This meeting summary was written by your ever cheerful Israel.pm PR person - Offer Kaye.