17 people came to yesterday's tech meeting.
I started off the meeting by telling people about ack, a powerful
alternative to grep written in Perl. Its features include automatically
skipping of "uninteresting files" (backup files, revision control
directories, etc.), highlighting the found text, and the ability to use
Perl regular expressions.
http://petdance.com/ack/
I showed a recent xkcd strip that mentioned Perl, and Mason then told us
about the webcomic Everybody Loves Eric Raymond.
http://www.xkcd.com/312/
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/
Sean Quinlan then gave us all a good introduction to HTML::Mason, a
high-performance, dynamic web site authoring system.
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?HTML::Mason
We continued with open discussions on:
Perl job opportunities and the lack of experienced Perl programmers;
Other ways CIDC might want to sponsor Boston Perl Mongers;
Academic interest in Perl (see Uri's perl vs. MIT post);
The state of Perl6.
Mitchell Charity concluded the meeting by showing off a laptop from the One
Laptop Per Child project and telling us a little about the project.
http://laptop.org/
Refreshments at this meeting were sponsored by CIDC. Thanks CIDC!
They're still looking to hire Perl developers...
http://www.cidc.com/
Also thanks to Sean for his presentation, and to Mason for letting me
piggyback on his internet connection.
And finally, thanks to everyone who came! I was worried because of the
short notice, but it turned out to be a good meeting.
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 9. Let me know if you would
like to give a presentation.
Ronald
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