The Shoulders Of Giants: 400 Years Of Perl 6

Damian Conway (‎damian‎)

Melbourne.pm

Thursday, 10 August 2017 13:50

60 minutes

Any

English 

Though Perl 6 was only officially released in late 2015, it has actually been in development for well over four centuries.

In this presentation, Damian will demonstrate some of the most useful, convenient, efficient, and just-plain-scary new features of Perl 6, by tracing the entire history of modern computing: from the heroine of Regency Era number theory, to the boffin whose crazy theory won the war, to the champions of free-love non-determinism in the psychedelic ’60s, to the sub rosa inventor of modern encryption, to the enigmatic rōshis of declarative quantum computation.

Along the way, we’ll explore the world’s least-obvious sequence; the world’s first sorting algorithm; the world’s worst sorting algorithm; the art and science of just guessing; how to write Lisp in any language; the joy of subscripts; Schrödinger's ket, the world’s worst sorting algorithm...optimized; the perils of high precision; the advantages of anonymity; Leonardo’s reward; Monte Carlo, Monty Hall, and Monty Python; and how to decrypt efficiently by destroying the entire universe (and possibly several others we passed along the way).