[wplug-announce] Pittsburgh Perl Mongers event: Damian Conway 10/29/2005 6:30PM

[Beth Lynn]

Hello,

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers have invited all WPLUG-ers to their event this 
Saturday evening with special guest speaker Damian Conway. Please note 
that this event will be in _Wean Hall 7500_. Do not go to Newell Simon 
because we won't be there!

You might have heard of Damian Conway as the author of the books "Perl 
Best Practices" and "Object Oriented Perl" If you've attended a yapc.org
conference, you might have seen Damian Conway speak there.

This is a real treat folks. Damian Conway talks are fascinating so even if 
you are not a huge fan of perl you are sure to enjoy it.

Hope to see you there!
Beth Lynn

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Pittsburgh Perl Mongers | Damian Conway: Sufficiently Advanced 
Technologies | Saturday Oct 29, 2005

*Special Gathering*

Please join us for a special meeting with Damian Conway.

*Location*

CMU
Wean Hall Room 7500
Pittsburgh, PA

Driving Directions
http://www.cmu.edu/home/visitors/directions.html

Campus Directions
http://www.cmu.edu/home/visitors/map/

Saturday, October 29, 2005
18:30

*Talk*

* Sufficiently Advanced Technologies - Damian Conway *

In module design, interface is everything. Going one step beyond this 
dictum, Damian demonstrates and explains several practical applications of 
Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable 
from magic") by presenting a series of useful modules whose interface 
is...nothing.


*Damian Conway*

Damian Conway holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is an Associate 
Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at 
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

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 
book "Object Oriented Perl". 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.

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 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.

Hope to see you there.