What you missed at Perl Conference 2.0 Couldn't make it to the big Perl gathering last month? Wish you had? Vicki Brown fills you in on what happened By Vicki Brown

September  1998

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San Francisco (September 1, 1998) -- It is remarkable that Perl, a popular programming language that has been in use since 1987, only recently celebrated its second annual conference in San Jose, CA. O'Reilly & Associates first published its popular book, Programming Perl in 1991; in 1996 the second edition, which covers Perl version 5, was published. In 1997, Tim O'Reilly decided that the time was right for a conference. One thousand attendees agreed.

Perl is a language for getting your job done -- or, as the authors of Programming Perl say, "Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible." If you don't know Perl, you should know that it's one of a family of languages commonly referred to as scripting languages (as opposed to system languages, such as C). Perl is based on the open source (or freeware) model, which means that the source code is a standard part of the Perl distribution. The open source model encourages sharing of source code within the user community, as well as a community approach to improvements, bug fixes, and new releases.

Focus on Perl The Perl Conference wrap-up How can you champion Perl? Conference news on JPL, XML, and LDAP Java-Apache Project report Open Source Developer Day highlights

Perl started out as the language of choice for system administration tasks, and has become the lingua franca for programming the World Wide Web. In fact, Perl's integration with the Web server has become so popular that this year's conference featured a full track concentrating on Apache and Perl.

Conference look and feel
Although this was only the second conference O'Reilly has undertaken, it seems to be evolving into an old hand at the conference game. Not everything was perfect. The discussion forums on the interactive pre-conference Web site weren't available until July -- and unlike last year, the interactive conference suffered from several notable CGI glitches that took awhile to be addressed. When they were addressed, however, they were fixed promptly and graciously.

I was especially pleased to note that conference personnel took the time to keep up to date with the various discussions in the interactive forums. Many questions were answered by conference officials. Zanna Knight, in particular, is to be commended for being on top of everything (and all at the same time!) without losing her aplomb.

The joy of information overload
The technical sessions were preceded by two days of tutorials, which covered topics ranging from learning Perl to advanced Perl fundamentals to regular expressions. Tutorials were available in half-day or full-day sessions and were taught by recognized experts in the various areas.

The conference featured five parallel tracks -- a plethora of Perl spread across two days! There was so much to do, and too many choices. I could have wished for three days of technical sessions with fewer choices in any given period.

Unlike some technical conferences, the O'Reilly Perl conference's focus is on practical programming solutions rather than academic research. Where last year's technical sessions consisted largely of invited papers, this year's conference featured a real review committee, with a call for papers several months in advance. The call for papers for next year's conference in Monterey, CA is up now. Click here for details.

Allied with complexity
The first day of technical sessions began with a keynote address from the Perl community's resident philosopher, Larry Wall -- the creator of Perl. The talk was unusual for a technical conference, focusing on such varied subjects as reality, chaos, and community; circles, triangles, and squares; the rings of an onion and the rings of a tree; not to mention Unicode.

Larry's talk centered more on the design philosophy behind Perl than on practical applications of the language itself. Anyone expecting a discourse on the finer points of Perl programming may have been disappointed.

For anyone who has ever felt that Perl is an overly complex language, Larry had an explanation. He called Perl "usefully complex." Often, he said, "computer-language designers oversimplify their languages, and end up sweeping the universe's complexity under the carpet of the programmer." Perl doesn't do this. It, like the English language, is useful because it's a mess, he claimed. "Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess -- though in the nicest of possible ways."

Larry Wall is, among other things, a talented programmer, a trained linguist, and a philosopher with a wry sense of humor. His varied background and interests have shaped Perl into what it is. Larry may not be what some people expect, but then neither is Perl.

Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess. --Larry Wall

The day finished up with the first-ever Internet Quiz Show, hosted by Jon Orwant, publisher of The Perl Journal. Two teams of three contestants each answered Perl questions, following a slightly simplified version of the College Bowl rules. The audience was encouraged to play along (silently!); the winners of the first two rounds met in a final playoff match.

Questions ranged from simple trivia (Question: What was an early possible name for the Perl language, discarded because it might be confusing? Answer: Gloria), to complex details (Of five modules named, which were introduced in Perl version 5.005?). Play was fast and furious; contestants and audience members joined in the fun (and the protests!), and the playoff round was closely matched. I look forward to the Quiz Show as part of next year's conference.

Day two began with a keynote speech by Tim Howes of Netscape, a newcomer to the world of open source. Underscoring Netscape's commitment to freeware, his talk was entitled Free Software Goes Mainstream: Netscape's mozilla.org. The day ended with a pair of simultaneous town meetings, one concentrating on Perl, the other on Apache. And, in between, there were more sessions.

Side notes
Some of the best parts of the conference didn't happen in either the tutorials or the technical sessions. The nightly Birds of a Feather sessions (BOFs) were definitely a highlight. The Perl Mongers BOF, co-hosted by the San Francisco Perl Users group, was popular, as was a session hosted by the Perl Institute (TPI). The Institute was restructured at the end of last year's Perl Conference -- the current board of directors is still working out ways in which TPI can best serve the needs of the Perl community.

I helped host the MacPerl BOF, which had more than twice the attendance of last year's ad hoc event. This year we were pleased to have Matthias Neeracher, porter and author of MacPerl, in attendance all the way from Zurich, Switzerland. MacPerl is an elegant port of Perl to an operating system without a command line. The MacPerl interface to the Macintosh Toolbox (GUI) modules accounts for one of the largest published sets of Perl XS (eXternal Subroutine) and interface code.

Lunch, provided as part of the conference package each day, was a great way to meet and get to know the other conference attendees. The Perl Mongers table, set up every day near the lunch area, was also a great meeting place. Perl Mongers is an organization dedicated to forming (and supporting) Perl user groups. The Perl Mongers themselves are fairly new on the scene, having been created at last year's Perl conference, but their popularity and visibility soared at this year's conference -- as witnessed by the hundreds of new members they signed up during the conference.

All in all, this year's Perl conference was a well-run and enjoyable event. I enjoyed four days of well-balanced technical information and socializing with like-minded Perl programmers at many levels of expertise. One attendee told me that this conference was much more congenial and open than other technical conferences she had attended. Rather than sniping at each others' ideas or protecting implementations, the Perl conference encourages open discourse and sharing of code. That's the open source way.

Open Source Developer Day
On Friday, immediately following the Perl conference, O'Reilly hosted the Open Source Developer Day, featuring speakers from various parts of the open source community. While this was originally planned as a separate event, O'Reilly decided to make registration free to Perl-conference attendees. Unfortunately, this decision was not announced until the week before the conference, leaving many interested conference attendees unable to change their travel plans in time to stay.

Even so, the day was well-attended. Speakers included Eric Raymond (Open Source,) Brian Behlendorf (Apache), Bob Young (Red Hat Linux), John Ousterhout (Tcl), and Richard Stallman (The GNU project). Panel sessions addressed issues of project management, open source business models, and licensing issues. The day was capped by another town meeting attended by a standing-room-only crowd of interested developers, programmers, and end users -- many of whom had been unable to attend the entire day's events.

There were a few small outbursts. Not everyone agreed on such issues as licensing or the subtle distinctions between proprietary and commercial code! But overall, the atmosphere was positive. With IBM's adoption of Apache as its Web server solution, and Netscape's decision to join the open source community, freeware solutions are being recognized by more corporations -- and by upper management -- as the important solutions they are. But then, we always knew that.

Resources

• Open Source http://www.opensource.org
• Perl Institute http://www.perl.org
• The Perl Journal http://www.tpj.com
• Perl Mongers http://www.pm.org
• Call for papers for Perl 3.0 http://conference.perl.com/pace/conf/confdocs/call.html

About the author
Vicki Brown is co-author of MacPerl: Power and Ease. She wrote her master's thesis on a Sun 1 (serial number 283) computer, back in the days when nroff was fancy technology. These days, she telnets into various flavors of Unix from her Power Macintosh. At her day job, she programs Perl. Reach Vicki at vicki.brown@sunworld.com.

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URL: http://www.sunworld.com/swol-09-1998/swol-09-perlconf.html
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