Special Presentation
Fun with Dead Languages
Damian Conway
Information Technology
Monash University
Jul 29 2008 7:00 PM
131 Hitchcock Hall
Abstract:
Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you'll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross- dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn't frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft's new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.
Bio: A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known software modules including: Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin). All of this software is available free from your local CPAN mirror.
A well-known member of the international Perl community, Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", and author of the books "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices". In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
He is also an honorary Associate Professor with the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia.
Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry's design decisions.
Other technical and academic areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
Damian Conway holds a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
Host: Tamera Cramer
