Damian Conway - Perl 6 Update June 23, 2004

Abstract:

The design of Perl 6 has moved ahead significantly in the past twelve months. In this talk, we will look at many new refinements to the language, with special emphasis on Perl 6's powerful new approach to object orientation.

About Damian Conway

Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl". He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science1 and currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of several infamous modules including: Parse::RecDescent (parsing without lexing),Lingua::EN::Inflect (English transformations without a dictionary), Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Perl programming without English), Class::Multimethods (polymorphism without objects), Quantum::Superpositions (quantum computing without tears), and Coy (error messages without karma). A three-time winner of the Perl Conference's Larry Wall Award, Damian is now banned from future competition2 and instead has the conference's Best Technical Paper named after him.

He is a member of the technical committee for the Perl Conference, the convener of the annual Perl haiku contest, a former columnist for The Perl Journal, and author of the book Object Oriented Perl.

Damian is closely involved in the design of Perl 6, where his job is to tempt Larry with evil ideas (such as properties, switches, currying , superpositions) and to explain Larry's apocalyptic visions.

He also runs an international IT training company -- Thoughtstream -- which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

He lists his technical interests as: programming language design, teaching programming, object orientation, software engineering, natural
language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.

He lists his personal interests as: reading, fitness, cinema, and Total World Domination.

In his spare time, he travels barefoot across the U.S. -- teaching, playing his flute, having alopecic flashbacks, preaching pacifist
philosophy, and generally beating the tar out of bad guys with his deadly kung-fu skills.

1. ...which did not prove to be the babe-magnet that the brochure implied.
2. ...on the grounds of being unfairly weird.

SOURCE: http://www.yetanother.org/damian/damian.html