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Yet Another Perl Conference - Canada

Posted by michael on from the canada-oh-canada dept.

minaguib writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Ottawa, Canada May 15th and 16th. Pre-Registration is now open and the calendar is not completely finalized, as they are still accepting presenter entries. This is a great way to get involved either as a presenter or an attendee."

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Depressionary Travel Expenses by Baldrson · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Sure lot's of Perl programmers have time on their hands but:
    How many people can afford the travel expenses during a depression?
    --
    Seastead this.
  2. The Superiority of PHP over Perl by egg+troll · · Score: 0, Interesting
    Hello Slashdot,

    Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.

    Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but can use Perl if I have to.

    • Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
    • The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
    • Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
    • Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
    • Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
    • Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
    • Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data structures.

    Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.

    Thank you and God bless,

    Egg Troll

    --

    C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
  3. Perl vs. Python. by jericho4.0 · · Score: 0, Interesting
    Trollish, but...
    Have any of you perl coders looked at python or PHP for whatever your apps are? I still use perl for little quick and dirty type things, but the 'line noise' phenomena makes something like python much more atractive for prototyping. And PHP much more atractive for dynamic web stuff. Where does perl shine anymore?

    flame on...

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  4. Void marketing scheme? by tedhiltonhead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I smell a marketing scheme. According to yapc.ca, the only scheduled training sessions are from employees of ExitCertified, an IT training company. Conveniently, ExitCertified is also in Ottawa. Further, why would I fly to a conference where they're still looking for speakers *two months* out? All they have are "Dick Hardt, founder of ActiveState" and two ExitCertified guys. If you want a truly amazing training/networking/fun experience, try a GeekCruise. I went on Linux Lunacy II in the Caribbean and hung out with Linus, Guido van Roosum (sp; invented Python), and Eric S. Raymond.