The Perl Hardware Store

This was my `invited talk' at The Perl Conference in 1998. It lasted about three-quarters of an hour. I had to cut it a little short, because I ran out of time; the part I bagged on is called Dynamic Programming.

Special Note: In 1999 I returned to the conference to give this talk again, plus a sequel, Return to the Perl Hardware Store. Notes for the sequel talk will appear here soon, probbaly by mid-September.

Table of Contents

Original Conception

This is pretty different from what I originally intended; I was going to do a lot of stuff with closures, show how to make message-passing objects so that you can roll your own object-oriented programming system with whatever inheritance semantics you want, how to build a dataflow programming system, constraint networks, a bunch of cool stuff like that mostly cribbed from Abelson and Sussman. And when I actually went to write the talk, I thought I'd deal with a couple of smaller items first, to get people sucked in before I turned to the abstruse parts. But the smaller items grew and multiplied, and then there wasn't any room for the abstruse stuff. So be sure to ask the conference folks to ask me back next year!

Alternate Titles

In issue #10 of The Perl Journal I threatened that the talk would be subtitled `Stop Programming in FORTRAN, Already', but I didn't end up doing what I thought I was going to, so it isn't called that. Here are the other rejected titles:

Most of these are more applicable to the original conception. If you want me to come speak to your group or company about any of these, send me mail and I'll rush right over.

Complete Notes

The PostScript version is also on the conference CD.


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