Hey there.

Claes Jakobsson said:
> On 22 maj 2007, at 11.12, Lemonnier, Erwan wrote:
>>
>> A preliminary suggestion would be to focus the workshop on talks that 
>> discuss dynamic programming and dynamic features in Perl. We would for 
>> example have talks about the new features in Perl6 and Parrot, about 
>> dynamic constructs such as closures, continuations, metaclass hacking, 
>> code generation, etc.
>
> Altho I like the idea I don't think it should be totally focused on 
> dynamic programming because of 1) it will be very hard to find enough 
> speakers that can speak about it and give interesting presentations, and 
> 2) it might scare away the non-academic world (you know those who 
> actually making money from Perl)

1) is definitely true, but that could be said for any topic - giving an 
interesting presentation by itself isn't an easy task, and finding 
enough people to fill a conference with them is even more difficult.

But wrt. 2), I think you shouldn't assume people aren't interested. 
Remember there are several types of programmers, of which the two most 
important (IMHO) are the "work" programmers (who just want to get the job 
done) and the "play" programmers (who find motivation and excitement in 
programming). Which of these target audicences should NPW'08 primarily 
cater to? Do you want to mainly attract programmers who are of the 
curious, playful type - or programmers that are just going to work every 
day to make money?


> Instead I think it would be more to get SU or KTH support by giving 
> their students a very very discounted price.

That's always an option.


>> An other idea would be to make a bridge between the hacker community 
>> around Perl6/Parrot and the academic world. This has been an important 
>> trend for many involved in Perl6/Parrot lately, with for example Audrey 
>> Tang and Jonathan W. going to wellknown academic conferences. That 
>> could mean talks about the way Parrot's guts are implemented, the way 
>> Perl6 is being designed or the way CPAN6 will look like.
>
> I'd say the academic world needs a bit of input from us hackers on "how 
> to get things done". So it's a good idea.

Hm. Maybe. Could be that you're a bit too "general" in the assertion you 
make about academia, but for some parts of it I'm sure you're right.


>> There are already conferences and workshops for dynamic languages, such 
>> as http://dyla2007.unibe.ch/?Call_for_papers. We could do something 
>> similar but restricted to Perl.
>
> I think we should rather not.. NPW has been and, IMHO, should continue 
> to be a workshop focused on the application of Perl and not too heavily 
> on internals, syntax and semantics despite the fact that I too find that 
> interesting. Seriously? how many professional programmers (- academia) 
> actually cares extremely deeply about it unless they are really 
> interested in it.

Well, I'd rather ask "How many professional programmers can become 
interested in these issues?" Especially if we can find people to hold 
interesting talks about such subjects (but this of course depends on you 
actually _wanting_ talks like that, and if you don't, then you close off 
quite a bit of possibilities in that direction.)

(Just my 0.02 Kr)


- Salve

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub AUTOLOAD{$AUTOLOAD=~/.*::(\d+)/;seek(DATA,$1,0);print#  Salve Joshua Nilsen
getc DATA}$"="'};&{'";@_=unpack("C*",unpack("u*",':4@,$'.#     <sjn@foo.no>
'2!--"5-(50P%$PL,!0X354UC-PP%/0\`'."\n"));eval "&{'@_'}";   __END__ is near! :)