Richard Jones' Log: OSDC aside

(separated from the other OSDC post so I don't sully it with langauge flamage ;)

I found it funny that during Damian Conway's closing keynote (which was brilliant, as were all his other talks that I attended - about 10 or so all up) there were little snippets - about half a line - of Perl code that he used as punchlines (along the lines of "and some people try this, which we can all see is totally misguided") ... except nobody in the audience laughs. It just takes too long to decode what's in front of them, figure out what it does - and which obscure Perl side-effect it's triggering - in time to get the joke. Hrm. Looking back, Damian had to spoon-feed the point to pretty much all his perl-code-based punchlines. The rest of the keynote was mostly language-agnostic, with Perl examples, and was quite brilliant, with a superb message about cleaning up your APIs (though a little too much emphasis on having your code use calling context to "guess" what the end-user-coder is trying to do with your API - one of my pet peeves with Perl).