I've had some more time to mine the London.pm and Seattle.pm (SPUG)
mailing lists for more detailed supporting references for this node.
First, we travel back in time to
Feb 19 2001,
the date of the historic Seattle.pm meeting that Damian was
travelling to (or from) in Dr Tim Maher's car
when he first thought of Bleach:
Special February Meeting:
Title: Whither Perl 6.0?
Speaker: Aussie Perl Guru Dr. Damian Conway
Indentured Servant #1 to Perl Community,
via Development Grant from "Yet Another Society"
Time: February 19th, 2001 (Third MONDAY), 7:00pm-9pm
Location: Union Bank of California Bldg, 5th Floor Mtg Room
NOTE: Usual location and time, but Monday, rather than Tuesday!
Yes, the truth can finally be revealed: I will actually be travelling
*backwards* in time to have given that talk, which I will soon be having
written from memory, perhaps at the very moment you will have had
been being reading this.
(Man, this transtemporal travel is tough on the tenses!)
Next, forward one week to
Feb 26 2001
to attend the London.pm "Conway Hall" meeting at which Damian
subsequently revealed Bleach:
London.pm proudly
presents my birthday, on 2001-02-26, in the Brockway Room, Conway
Hall, Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL from 7pm.
You may all get me very large presents.
Oh, and Perl God Damian Conway will be doing his
wonderful Quantum::Superpositions lecture there as well.
You can meet him on Sunday in the Penderels Oak from 6.30ish too.
Then a surprise.
Just two days later, on
Feb 28 2001, one "Matthew Robinson" proposed a Pony module based on Bleach!
And even had the temerity to post an implementation:
Although I didn't make it to the pub after Damian's talk I did hear from my
sources that someone thought it would be 'useful' to convert Bleach.pm to
print pony instead. So here it is Pony.pm, it isn't quite the same as
Bleach but it produces a similar result.
Enjoy,
Matt
package Pony;
$VERSION = '1.00'; # MSR - 28 Feb 2001
$magic = "pony " x 4;
sub pony { local $_ = unpack("b*", pop); s/0/ /g; s/1/pony/g; $magic.$
+_ }
sub depony { local $_ = pop; s/^$magic//; s/pony/1/g; s/ /0/g; pack("b
+*",
$_) }
open 0 or die;
($script = join("", <0>)) =~ s/^(.*^use\s+Pony\s*;\s*?\n)//sm;
$header = $1;
do { eval depony($script); exit } if ($script =~ /^$magic/);
open(0, ">$0") or die;
print {0} $header.pony($script);
Finally, on
Apr 1 2001
we learn not only about the Buffy and Pony modules,
but also the DNA module by Schwern,
and the SuperPython module by MJD,
all released on April Fools' Day 2001.
With all that global namespace trampling on a single day,
no wonder there was such a crying need to create the Acme namespace:
This week was fairly random, mainly because of April Fool's Day.
I released a silly Buffy module (which, a la Bleach, converts modules
into "BUffY bUFFY BUffY bUFFY bUfFy buffy..."), with example decss code.
Schwern released DNA ("CCAA CCAA AAGT CAGT TCCT CGCT..."),
mjd released SuperPython (" ..."), and
David Cantrell released (late) Pony,
a converter to "a lovely ASCII-art rendition of a pony".