Guest Speaker: Damian Conway Doubleheader

This isn't a Perl Mongers exclusive meet but we skip our usual last Thursday of the month when a very special someone lands in Toronto. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing Damian talk, you should know he's a mad genius with a gift for speaking and will enthrall you if you have even the tiniest interest in anything tech. He will also hurt your brain... in a good way.

Damian Conway (http://damian.conway.org/About_us/Bio_formal.html) (a former Professor at Monash University in Australia and the principal of Thoughtstream, his IT Training Company) will be presenting the second of two days of talks. This will be doubleheader! This is the more Perly of the two days.

Talk #1: A Few Of My Favorite Things

Up-scoping context, the lexical-hints hash,
Padwalking my vars, programmable fail cache,
Subpattern regexes matching source strings,
These are a few of my favorite things.
User-definable keyword conversions,
Perl Parsing Interface, table inversions,
Tools that make Perl even more amazing
These are a few of my favorite things
When the bug bites,
When syntax stings,
When I'm being bad:
I simply deploy all my favorite things
Then I can write code that's mad.

(Ed. Perl 5 Madness, Damian style.)

Talk #2: Sex and Violence: Social and Technical Lessons from the Perl 6 Project

In June 2000, Larry Wall announced a new four-month Open Source development effort: the reinvention of Perl. In this keynote, Damian Conway will unfold the twisting and sordid tale of what happened over the next ten years of the project, highlighting the sexy new language that has been created, the extreme violence that was sometimes necessary to make it happen, and the dozen or so harsh-but-invaluable lessons that the development team learned along the way.

I can haz donation plz?

Damian's trip here is un-funded... out of his own pocket. Donations would be greatly appreciated. This would go towards his air fare, hotel and food while staying in Toronto. Any excess donations will be given to Damian as an honourarium. Please contact the Meetup organizer (Dave Doyle (https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-Perl-Mongers/members/10713539/)) if you'd like to donate so he can put you in touch with the correct party.