Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 11:54:05 +0100
From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: YAPC::Europe wrap-up

YAPC::Europe is over, and it was a great success.

The conference, which lasted three days, was held in London's Institute
for Contemporary Arts; not the traditional venue for a programming event,
but then, Perl is something of an art form.  The 250 attendees got their
share of art, too: Simon Cozen's keynote speech on "Art and Open Source"
was followed by Duncan White on "Generating Abstract Art Using Perl"
and Alex MacLean on "Generative Perl Music".

The YAPC conferences appear to be turning into an institution; to this
end, YAS (Yet Another Society -- see www.yetanother.org) has been formed
as a 501(3)(c) non-profit to help support perl conferences, volunteer
activities, and generally create a civil society for the Perl community.
If you want to get involved in YAS, Kevin Lenzo (lenzo@cs.cmu.edu)
is your man. Meanwhile, the next European YAPC is tentatively scheduled
for Amsterdam in late 2001.

There was, as you'd expect, a large number of successful tutorials on
general Perl technique and specific modules: Johan Vroman's session on
object oriented programming was well-attended: but the real draw that
packed out the conference was Sunday's discussion on Perl 6, chaired
by Nathan Torkington <gnat@frii.com>. Perl 6 is a clean-sheet project
unrelated to Chip Salzberg's Topaz development work (other than to
draw upon its experiences); a series of RFCs are being proposed for
modifications to go into Perl 6, and these will be frozen on October
1st. The next milestone due is October 14th, at Atlanta Linux Showcase
-- where Larry will announce the design of Perl 6, and the development
process will begin in earnest. (Users will be pleased to hear that one
requirement for Perl 6 is that 95% of Perl 5 code should be able to
run without modification, and that of the remaining 5%, 95% should be
modifiable by automated migration tools.)

(It's too soon to discuss the ideas that were thrown about during this
session, but if half of them show up in Perl 6 it's going to be very
cool indeed.)

A striking feature of YAPC::Europe was the enthusiasm of the organisers;
they hadn't run a conference before, but they nevertheless held this
one together surprisingly well. Their enthusiasm was matched by the
attendees -- doubtless we'll be hearing about modules and language
extensions hatched at this conference for months to come. 



-- Charlie Stross
   (Exhausted and back home)