For Sale: 1 Damian Conway, 1 Dan Sugalski

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

For Sale: 1 Damian Conway, 1 Dan Sugalski

Posted by chrisd on Thursday December 13, 2001 @09:30AM from the here-comes-another-one dept.

Kurt writes "Yet Another Society, through its newly formed Perl Foundation, is launching yet another fund drive to help support the Perl community. This year we will be supporting Damian Conway and Dan Sugalski. Damian will continue to work on a variety of Perl 5 modules and the design of Perl 6. Dan will continue his work on the implementation of Perl 6. More details are available at the Perl Foundation web site. Contributions are tax deductible, so donate today!" Many people will remember when we did this last year. I think it's been a roaring success. So go donate!

1 of 96 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

I'm torn . . . by DeborahArielPickett · 2001-12-13 12:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

I suppose I have a slightly different perspective on this than most folks on slashdot. I teach the one and only Perl course at Monash University. Damian's office is three doors down the hall from mine (when he's in his office at all, which isn't often). I had the good fortune to be taught by Damian when I was an undergrad.
On one hand: This is great for Perl. Anyone who has dabbled in the language knows that Damian has Plans for Perl what we mere mortals can never truly understand. I'm still drooling over the thought of a proper switch statement in Perl. As for curried expressions, well, if they're anything as good as curried chicken, I'm all for it.
On the other hand: There's a whole generation of Monash University students growing up without having the joy of being taught by Damian. The poor things are getting substandard teaching (well, actually, they're probably getting standard teaching; what I know they're not getting is superstandard teaching), and they are graduating without the fond memories of the acted-out-in-lectures singles-bar analogy for C++ polymorphism. (You Monash graduates know what I'm talking about.)
On the gripping hand: I'm easily the next-best Perl programmer to be teaching at Monash University. With Damian out of the way, it's only a matter of time before total domination of Monash is mine . . .