Interview: Damian Conway | Hacker News Reader

Interview: Damian Conway

linuxvoice.com

77 pointsbenev8 comments

I once had the pleasure of following Damian's presentation techniques course. A really good course that i can recommend to every programmer and engineer. Perl and me however do not get along. Yet still looking forward to see where perl 6 will go.

Well, you can always try Klingon. [1]

1. I was present when he introduced programming in Klingon -- via Perl. Perhaps a different kind of "presentation" technique -- but it was certainly up to snuff.

I was not amenable to learning Klingon, but I did have a certain appreciation for its imperative style.

Cant find which one it is, but a talk about perl6 grammar dsl/lib was very inspiring. Very very very.

As someone who's been distantly following Perl6 from its inception, the new RE grammars are the most exciting thing to me. It's the one time I've seen a YACC type thing and thought, "ah, this is how it should be."

I predict that if Perl6 ever becomes somewhat released/stable/fast we'll start seeing a bunch of compilers/transpilers written in it.

> You have to give them a way of focusing on one level of abstraction at a time.

Very true. Though having levels of syntax can actually help with this, such as python's indentation. The boilerplate of if and for helps beginners to recognize it.

In contrast, I've seen Group Theory notation with juxtiposition for both function application and composition, distinguishing functions and variables by alphabet and inference. It's very compact and elegant, but hard to read at first.

Even if you're not a perl programmer, attending a presentation by The Damian will be time well spent. He's not only brilliant and insightful, but very entertaining!

I was present for a talk at a YAPC years ago where I think he first introduced programming in Klingon. Most of it was way over my hear, but it was brilliant nonetheless.

Went through one of his courses, and although I don't use Perl, I learned quite a lot about programming as a whole.

One of Damian's pictures in the article holds a quote where he says something about Rails enabling "not very strong" developers to build fairly sophisticated systems.

I wish the author had included that part of the interview. I never found it anywhere in the article.

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