Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Last Thursday night we had Paul Fenwick from Perl Training Australia giving two talks - "The Art of Klingon Programming" and "Awesome Things You've Missed In Perl". I'd see the first one before at OSDC 2008, but Paul is still constantly improving this talk so it's still worth seeing again. In particular it's the examples that often have me saying "of course!" and "how clever", as Paul introduces some subtle new feature or variation on what he's said before that gives a new perspective on autodie's usefulness.

"Awesome Things You've Missed In Perl" is a good way of updating seasoned Perl coders to the new things you can do with recent versions of Perl. It's more about the modules that have come out in recent years that make writing Perl much easier, such as Moose, autobox, and autodie (of course). But there's still much that Paul mentions that exists in Perl 5.10 that makes a coder's life easier; given/when, the smart match operator and named captures just for starters. For us people that still have a Camel book second edition on their desks (somewhat guiltily), it's an excellent refresher and reminder to get with the times. It also makes the transition to Perl 6 much easier.

The meeting was very well attended - 18 people - including three from the class that Paul was teaching. For me it was a wonderful "small world" moment as a friend of mine from Melbourne happened to be at the course - of course, my embarrassingly useless people memory caused me to have to ask her name. But it really was quite wonderful to see Louise again, albeit somewhat briefly. The main programmer for the water resources project that Paul was tutoring was interested to learn about the Canberra Perl Mongers group and will hopefully join and come along as a regular participant.

So, thank you Paul Fenwick for making this a really great night!