Agenda
On 15 September, 2005, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:
- 19:00-19:30 -- Assembly and light refreshments
- 19:30-20:30 -- Felix Liberman: "Visual Perl/Tk - GUI development solution for beginners and professionals"
- 20:30-20:45 -- Break
- 20:45-21:45 -- Gaal Yahas: "Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers: We've Got a Wonderful Language for You"
- As usual after the meeting we will go out to a nearby pub/coffee-shop/etc. for a post-meeting social gathering.
Location: Tel-Aviv University
Report
- Ran Eilam
- Gabor Szabo
- Oded S. Resnik
- Kate Delikat
- Thomas Maier
- Miki Eden
- Offer Kaye
- Shlomi Fish
- Yuval Yaari
- Beni Cherniavsky
- Uri Bruck
- Pinkhas Nisanov
- Oren Izmirli
- Gaal Yahas
- 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.