From:	Salve J Nilsen	Date:	Wed May 23 05:07:23 2007
Subject:	Re: Some ideas for NPW2008 in Stockholm

Tobias Wrigstad said:
>
> Hi guys,

Hi, and welcome to the NPW crowd! :-D


> I'm one of the academics Erwan talked about. In case you are
> wondering, what makes me interested in helping out with NPW
> are two things:
>
> 1) connecting PL researchers with the PL communities
> 2) connecting students with PL communities
>
> I think that the Programming Language community and the
> PL researchers in the academia have a lot to offer each other.
> For example, there is a lot of cool stuff that's only available
> in research languages (and Perhaps in Perl 6...) but very few
> really widespread languages have ever come out of academia. I'd
> like to see that changed.

I'm completely with you on that, I'd love to see more theoretical stuff on 
Perl conferences. And even if the more esoteric ideas in the academic 
community won't be implemented in Perl 6 (despite it's open source 
nature), there's nothing wrong in trying to influence the development of 
Perl 6 into something that allows the PL community to get a new and better 
tool to experiment with. :)


> What I was thinking would be to try and get academics to give
> presentations thinking that talks of a more general nature should
> be interesting to the Perl community too. A bit like a basic
> course in algorithms are good regardless of programming languages.
> Cool and inspiring stuff is cool and inspiring to Perl programmers
> too. I think you get my point. And I think academics will get
> something out of meeting vibrant programming crowd.

Hm. Well, basic stuff in good sometimes, but I'm not sure NPW is the right 
venue for learning to program (traditionally, there has been assumption 
that the attendee already knows the basics when going to a conference.) Or 
am I misunderstanding you?

Still, your point in letting academia and programming communities mix a 
bit more is quite good. I'd love to see more of that (and that's why we 
made an extra effort to include the students in Oslo at last year's NPW.)


> For the student bit, I really think they will benefit from getting
> involved in PL communities -- be it Perl or any other fairly open
> and friendly programming community.

Yep. There's lots of interesting things going on within the Perl community 
(as with other communities) and sharing this with students and others in 
academia is definitely a Good Thing[tm]. :)


> I also understand that you want to protect the P in NPW, by all
> means. I think my goal fits under a more general theme hat. The
> important bit is who you try to coerce to come to town, I guess.
>
> I am hopeful that we can work something out with the University
> for venue. I am not sure exactly what the policy is, and what
> deals have been struck before, but I will try and find out and
> report back to you. (I'm not in Sweden at the moment, so this
> will happen next week at the earliest.)

I wish you good luck with that. :)


- Salve J. Nilsen (Primus motor of NPW'06 and Oslo Perl Mongers leader)

-- 
#!/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! :)