News on IPW2009 – DBI, Perl6, Javascript and… Dave Rolsky?

The preparations for this year’s Italian Perl workshop are hotting up, and it’s looking like it might even top last year’s event. I’ll just focus on the international track (in English) here: we’ve already got some great guest speakers lined up:

  • Tim Bunce, the author of DBI, one of the finest database interfaces known to man. Tim is also a smashing bloke, and this is his return invite to the IPW, by popular demand!
  • Jonathan Worthington, one of the core devs for Perl 6 (Rakudo and Parrot VM).
  • Thomas Fuchs, Javascript guru – who says Perl conferences are just about Perl!
  • Amy Hoy/Fuchs, user interaction and product design expert.

And we have at least one other tempting (but not yet confirmed) morsel up our sleeves…

Dave Rolsky (autarch) on Moose…?

Moose is a “postmodern OO system” for Perl. If you love LISP, you might be interested to know it’s based on CLOS. If you love Smalltalk, you might appreciate its use of Roles. In any case, Moose is full of awesomeness, and is currently making Perl OO look way more attractive and powerful than it used to…

Dave Rolsky (autarch) is one of the core Moose devs, as well as the author of DateTime and HTML::Mason among others. We’d really like him to talk at the IPW, but there’s just the small matter of paying his airfare from the States… Luckily, he’s willing to give a special paid day’s training on Moose, probably on Wednesday 21st October, the day before the conference. If we can get enough participants, we’ll be able to invite him for the workshop too…

All the details are in this
announcement, but I’d just like to point out:

  • The ticket price (likely to be 100 Euros for the day) is ridiculously good value compared to the normal going rate – that’s because it’s a “grassroots” price, solely for the purpose of paying his way to talk at the Italian Perl Workshop (which is entirely free!)
  • Dave doesn’t get to Europe much. In fact, up till now, never – so this is a very rare opportunity.
  • Pisa is really central – you can fly there from a massive number of European cities, often direct, and often with a choice of traditional or low-cost airline.
  • There will most likely be a whole track in English: as well as the guest speakers I mentioned above, there’ll be others. For example, I’ll probably be speaking… why don’t you submit a talk too ;-)

If you’re interested, please email info@perl.it.