Tom Moertel's Weblog: Tag talks

Talk: Fun with Numbers: R and Perl (and IMDB data)

Tom Moertel — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:38:00 -0400

Last week I gave a talk on the R statistics system and Perl for the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers. The example that threaded through the talk was something I have written about here before, extracting useful information from the Internet Movie Database. If you’ve read my earlier blog post or have used the Grand Unified IMDB Movie Rating Decoder Ring, you might find the slides from the talk interesting. They provide some more details about the R and Perl code used to analyze the IMDB data and create the decoder ring.

You can get the slides here:

The 2006 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is a ten-ton can of programming whoop-ass

Tom Moertel — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:30:00 -0400

I am on the planning committee for the 2006 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop and serve as the primary point of contact for speakers. That means I get the inside scoop on the talks. And from what I have seen, all I can say is, These talks kick ass. Well, actually I can say one more thing:

If there is any possible way you can manage to get yourself to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Saturday, 23 September 2006, do not wait, do not mull it over, register now for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop.

If you miss this one, you’ll probably end up weeping in front of your keyboard for a long, long time.

PPW ’06 has speakers from the worlds of finance, bioinformatics, engineering, politics, health care, insurance, Web-2.0 start-ups, environmental monitoring, and mathematics. And they all have fascinating things to share with you about how they make Perl work for them and about how you can make Perl work for you.

Registration is only $20 – can you imagine that, in an age when programming conferences routinely cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars? – and all of the talks show you how to use Perl to do real work, solve real problems, and make your real life as a programming professional a whole lot saner. Even if you think you don’t care about Perl, you ought to be a part of PPW ’06 just for the rare opportunity to discover something you may have overlooked. (At $20, when are you ever going to get a chance like this again?)

Talk: Embedded domain-specific languages for Perl

Tom Moertel — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:39:00 -0500

Last week I gave a brief talk for the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers about embedding domain-specific languages into Perl. The slides from the talk are now available: Embedding an XHTML template language into Perl.

Damian Conway's talk on Sufficiently Advanced Technologies

Tom Moertel — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:41:00 -0500

Over the weekend I attended Damian Conway’s talk on Sufficiently Advanced Technologies, hosted by the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers and presented at CMU.

This was my first Damian Conway talk, and it was great. I don’t know how Damian manages to give a killer talk immediately after suffering a long, international flight and the associated time-zone changes, but he did it. If you ever get the chance to see Damian speak, don’t miss it.

The idea behind the talk was Arthur C. Clarke’s bit about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic. When it comes to programming, Damian argued, “sufficiently advanced” technologies ought not to impose programming taxes upon us; gaining their benefits should be transparent and free – otherwise, we won’t use them.

One example that Damian provided to illustrate this idea was an updated version of Lingua::EN::Inflect that automatically looks into interpolated strings and rewrites them on the fly to ensure that they represent sensible English. Thus if you wrote code like this:

print "$count errors were found\n"

Lingua::EN::Inflect would ensure that the right thing happens for different values of $count:

0 errors were found
1 error was found
2 errors were found

Why do this? Because we already have easy ways to get the inflections right – a simple test and the ?: operator is all it takes - and yet we don’t do it; thus, the cost of doing it must be too high. In other words, the existing technology must not be sufficiently advanced, and we ought to improve upon it.

Damian argued that Perl was a great language for creating Sufficiently Advanced Technologies (SATs). To help make his case, he cited Xavier Noria’s Acme::Pythonic, which changes Perl’s syntax to use Python’s whitespace conventions. (I thought that this was an interesting example because a couple of years ago I had written a horrifying Perl module (LayoutRule.pm) to bring Haskell’s layout rule to Perl.) If sweeping changes like this took only a few pages of code, he argued, many other SATs were within reach. (He jokingly said that it was a little scary how close Perl was to the darkness that is Python. This got a big laugh.) And, he said, Perl 6 is going to make Perl an ideal language for creating SATs.

He showed us some other examples of SATs he was working on. One was a library for gathering user input that infers from its context how it is being used and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Another was a Smart Comments module that lets comments hold assertions, aid in debugging, and generate progress bars.

In sum, it was a fun talk that made a clear argument for reducing the costs imposed by the interfaces we create for our libraries. The talk made me feel better about some of my more recent attempts to lower the cost of doing things that I find too expensive in Perl, such as specializing functions and testing algorithmic code. The talk also convinced me to place more effort on optimizing the interfaces of my code for use, rather than for some distant “best practice” notion of what makes a good interface.

The talk made me want to change something, and that’s a pretty good thing to say about a talk.