The Perl Journal August 2003
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2003 in Oregon couldn't have come off better. Portland's river view is beautiful and the weather was never less than pleasant. Powell's Technical Books was an amazing warehouse of technical treasures. I had to constantly remind myself that anything I bought there, I would have to take home in a suitcase.
The big Perl news was the announcement of Ponie, the transitional Perl 5.10 that will be based on the Parrot virtual machine. During his State Of The Onion talk, Larry Wall explained how Ponie would provide a migration path from Perl 5 to Perl 6. People won't be able to convert to Perl 6 all at once, and need a way to migrate. Ponie will also "ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code," he said.
Ponie's compatibility will be pretty slick. It will implement the current Perl internals in Parrot, which will mean compatibility with the XS API. Ponie will effectively emulate the Perl 5 virtual machine. Fotango, a London-based consultancy, is devoting 35 percent of the time of Arthur Bergman, the driving force behind Perl threads, to the Ponie effort, for at least the next two years.
Ponie: http://www.poniecode.org/
SOTO: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/soto2003.html
Fotango: http://opensource.fotango.com/
The OSCON wiki was a huge success. A wiki is a web-based hypertext information store that lets anyone modify pages on the fly. The wiki was created weeks before the start of the convention, and was updated by literally hundreds of users. Some contributed only their names to the list of attendees, while others maintained elaborate lists of Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. It became the electronic equivalent of a bulletin board, but far more interactive.
Brian Ingerson has become quite an evangelist for wikis. His CGI::Kwiki has made a convert out of me, now that I've seen it in action. He's also created Test::Fit, for integrating Perl's testing framework into a wiki based on the Fit testing framework.
CGI::Kwiki: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI-Kwiki/
OSCON wiki: http://oscon.kwiki.org
Fit: http://fit.c2.com/
There was a lot of time and interest devoted to automated software testing. Besides the session I gave on the subject, Geoff Young talked about Apache::Test, Ward Cunningham and Brian Ingerson talked about Test::Fit, and Michael Schwern and chromatic's gave a half-day testing tutorial. It's a topic that will be critical to the Ponie project, since Perl 5 will be rewritten from the ground up, yet must work identically.
The Perl Foundation auction raised $4500 for helping further Perl. Besides the expected signed copies of books, items up for bid included stuffed animals, Mark-Jason Dominus's magic pointy wizard hat, and the right to choose the color of search.cpan.org. The London.pm group loves orange, and there was an intense bidding war between the London.pm group, who wanted to change the color, and a group who wanted to keep search.cpan.org the same. When the smoke cleared, the antiorange group won the auction, but Graham Barr agreed to give in to a month of orangeness as a consolation.
Amidst all the talks and tutorials, the greatest benefit of OSCON is to meet fellow open sourcers face-to-face. These were people I knew and worked with online for years, and yet the immediacy of meeting and talking with them for a week was far more productive than a month of e-mail or IRC. This sort of mingling is one way to foster the opportunities for cross-pollination that make open-source languages so vital. In fact, I made a point of thanking Guido von Rossum and Matz, of Python and Ruby, respectively, for the innovations they were bringing to the language table for Perl to steal from. In the open-source world of language innovation, a rising tide truly does lift all boats. I was disappointed that there was only a small commons area with a dozen small tables for meeting one's peers. The next OSCON needs dedicated mingling space.
All this makes clear the importance of groups like local Perl Mongers chapters, and of getting to work with your comrades-in-code. Especially interesting was my realization of the impact that London.pm has on the Perl community, specifically on Perl 6. On the flight home, I envied the London.pm group, and thought about what marvelous things could be done if my own Chicago.pm could pull together and make things happen.
—Andy Lester