Damian Conway at Scotsman: Don't change languages. Change your language!

The brilliant speaker and instructor Damian Conway is back in Oslo!

For the 5th consecutive year, Oslo.pm has the honor of organizing an entertaining show presentation with Damian Conway at the Scotsman on the 2nd floor, on Wed. 20. April at 18:00.

We expect the room to fill up, so come early if possible.

This year's talk is:


Don't change languages. Change your language!

No programming language is perfect. Whether you develop in PHP or Perl, Python or Java, Scala or sh, Clojure or Cobol, there's something about your devlang that you find awkward and ungainly and difficult – some misfeature (or missing feature) that makes your job unnecessarily harder. Some construct or constraint that irritates you beyond all reason.

The grass often looks greener on the other side. You hear people raving about Haskell or Scala or Erlang or Groovy or Perl 6, and you wonder whether it might be better to migrate to one of those brave new worlds.

But to change your environment, you don't always have to change planets. Most of the time, it's vastly easier and more effective just to improve your existing planet.

In this talk, Damian will look at four major annoyances and blockers in one of his own favorite languages (Perl 5), and explain how he went about converting them into features and enablers…just by writing a little more Perl.

This will be an entertaining and insightful talk by one of the worlds very greatest communicators in programming. Although presented from a Perl point of view, the topics discussed apply to programming in any language in general.

Entrance is free and open for all. Food and drinks will be sold at the bar. If you want food, we recommend you come early to get served before the talk starts.


There will also be a talk by Damian on Friday the 22nd: Damian Conway at UiO: Perl 6 - More Concurrency, Less Contusion.