From 55783c26c7e70433fb4905ec006a80d15c6d1a96 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Patrick Spek <p.spek@tyil.work>
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2018 01:04:58 +0200
Subject: Add day 1 talks from TPCiG

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+---
+date: 2018-08-15
+wip: true
+tags: Perl Conference
+description: >
+  My feedback and comments on some of the talks I attended during The Perl
+  Conference in Glasgow, in 2018.
+---
+= The Perl Conference in Glasgow
+:toc: preamble
+
+This year the European Perl Conference was hosted in Glasgow, and of course
+I've attended a number of presentation there. On some of these, I have some
+feedback or comments. These talks, and the feedback I have for them, are
+detailed in this blog post. For some talks, I'll detail it as a summary of the
+presentation, because I feel the message is important.
+
+[NOTE]
+====
+The first talk I cover is not so much about Perl, but more about politics, as
+the talk was mostly about the speaker's ideology. If this does not interest
+you, I'd suggest you skip the link:#discourse-without-drama[Discourse Without
+Drama] section, and head straight to the
+link:#european-perl-mongers-organiser-s-forum-2018[European Perl Mongers
+Organiser’s Forum 2018].
+====
+
+== Discourse Without Drama
+
+This was the first talk, and the only talk available at this timeslot. I am
+personally very much against the diversity ideology footnote:[I am not against
+the concept of diversity, I wholly support the idea of equal opportunities.
+What I do not accept is the idea of equal outcome, or forced diversity based on
+physical traits. This is what I refer to with "the diversity ideology", as this
+is what it has become in recent times.], and must admit I am skeptical of such
+presentations from the get-go. Nonetheless, I did stay until the end and tried
+to give it a fair shot.  However, I cannot sit idle while she tries to force
+her ideology on this community I care very deeply about.
+
+One of the things that stood out to me is that the speaker tells us not to use
+logical fallacies to condemn her ideology. This on itself I can easily agree
+with. However, this should go both ways: we should also not use logical
+fallacies to promote her ideology. Most notably, she pointed out the
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum[_argumentum ad populum_].
+This basically means that just because a lot of people do or say something,
+doesn't make it right. And this applies to this idea that we need to push the
+diversity ideology, with concepts like a code of conduct footnote:[I personally
+prefer calling it a "code of misconduct", as these documents are mostly used to
+draft a list of misconducts that will bring repurcussions with them, not detail
+how the community tries to better itself.], in the Perl community.
+
+Another thing which slightly bothered me is the useless spin into radical
+feminist ideology, which has no place on the Perl conference. We're not at a
+political rally here, we're at a Perl conference. Surely, things can (and will)
+get political from time to time, but the way the presenter forces us into
+talking about her ideology seems unfit for this event.
+
+Next, the speaker raises the point that people should *not* grow a thicker
+skin. Instead, people should get softer hearts. While I can get behind the
+latter part, I disagree with the former. Different people have different ideas
+of what counts as offensive, which is part of why it's impossible to guarantee
+a "safe space" where nobody will ever be offended. If everybody can just be
+offended at anything and have the other party suffer repurcussions for it, it's
+just a clear invitation to abuse by the perpetually offended.
+
+The speaker was also very defensive about being called a "social justice
+warrior", and informed the crowd that if she were to be called one, she'd
+gladly take up a sword. This gives off a feeling that the presenter isn't
+interested in civil discourse to come to an agreement together with everyone.
+Instead, she'd rather strike down any and all who don't completely accept her
+ideology.
+
+While discussing her points for instating certain rules such as a code of
+conduct in one of the IRC channels I moderate, I was pointed towards
+https://shiromarieke.github.io/coc.html[a very interesting article], which I
+would recommend to the speaker and anyone else reading this. If we truly need
+to have a code of conduct at the Perl community, I'd like to propose the text
+from this particular poster, found all around the conference:
+
+image::https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/ZAHwJvcPyKLIgnDqWBxJyctD[Perl Code of Conduct, 400, 600, role="center"]
+
+Additionally, I'd like to leave this particular quote to the speaker herself,
+which was written on the wall of one of the rooms during the conference:
+
+[quote, Oscar Romero]
+____
+Aspire not to have more, but to be more...
+____
+
+== European Perl Mongers Organiser's Forum 2018
+
+The Perl community isn't big nowadays, which is sad. The Perl 6 language also
+offers a lot of concepts which are very well suited for modern programming.
+However, if no new users try out the language, it will be all for nothing. As
+such, we need to bring new blood in to the community.
+
+One of the ways of doing this, is by extending our promoting efforts outside of
+the Perl community. Most people who like Perl are in a social bubble with other
+people that are also familiar with the Perl programming language, be it 5 or 6.
+But we need to reach new people as well, who will most likely be outside of
+this social bubble. These people don't have to be techies either, they might
+just as well be marketeers or designers.
+
+I myself am part of the "techies", so I'll stick to this particular group for
+now. And I know people like me can be found at meetups, so it would be
+worthwhile to promote Perl at meetups which are not dedicated to Perl. Think of
+more generic programming meetups, or GNU+Linux User Groups. We have to be
+mindful not to be too pushy, though. Listen to others people, and try to
+understand the problem they're facing. Most of them will not be open to use a
+different language immediately, especially not Perl (which sadly has a
+particularly bad standing amongst people unfamiliar with it). Try to assist
+them with their issues, and slowly introduce them to Perl (6) if it helps to
+showcase what you mean. It might also be interesting to show people examples on
+how to solve certain issues before telling them the language's name, so they
+don't have a negative preconception solely from the name.
+
+Another thing to note is that Perl is more than just a programming language.
+It's a community, and a large library of modules, known as CPAN. And CPAN
+offers some nifty tools, such as the CPAN testers, which help ensure module
+developers that their code runs on a massive set of platforms and Perl
+versions.
+
+This has led me to consider the creation of a new Perl 6 module:
+`CPAN::Tester`, to make it easy for people to contribute to a large-scale
+testing environment for Perl 6. The idea is that one can run `CPAN::Tester` on
+their machine, which will keep track of new Perl 6 modules being uploaded to
+CPAN. The results are to be sent to another server (or multiple servers), which
+can aggregate the data and show a matrix of test results. This aggregating
+server could also be built as a Perl 6 module, possibly named
+`CPAN::Tester::ResultsServer`. This would make setting up an environment
+similar to CPAN testers for Perl 5 quite easy for Perl 6.
+
+== TPF Update
+
+This talk gave some interesting information on the current state of The Perl
+Foundation. And there have been some nice developments in the past year, mostly
+the updated websites (https://perl.com and https://perlfoundation.org). Sadly,
+some sites remain in a slightly outdated state, though there are plans to
+update these too. Most notably, https://jobs.perl.org seems to require a
+webmaster to bring the platform online and keep it in check. If this is
+something you'd like to do, don't hesitate to contact The Perl Foundation about
+it.
+
+Furthermore, The Perl Foundation is looking for more sponsors, as always.
+However, you don't need to be a massive corporation to be able to help them
+out. They are looking for more smaller sponsors as well. The money of the
+sponsorships will be used to support the Perl community. This means money will
+be going towards organizing events, such as The Perl Conference, or grants for
+both Perl 5 and Perl 6 development and promotion.
+
+If you'd like to help the Perl community through The Perl Foundation by
+volunteering, this is also greatly appreciated. The time commitment expected of
+you will depend very much on the tasks you want to deal with, but about 10
+hours a month is a good estimate.
+
+== Perl 6 in Real Life $Work
+
+The speaker shows the perfect use case for
+https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars[Perl 6 grammars], advanced yet
+readable parsing of text and doing stuff with the results. It's an interesting
+talk, showcasing some nifty grammar constructs. The best part of this is, that
+it actually runs in production, where it parses over 700 files, consisting over
+100,000 lines of code, in about 22 seconds (on his laptop). This goes to show
+that Perl 6 is no longer "too slow to use in production".
+
+It might be interesting to run this application of grammars on every Perl 6
+release to gather more information on the speed improvements of Perl 6, much
+like Tux's `Text::CSV` runs.
+
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