Esteemed Monks,

Last week I participated in a gathering of 300 developers in Tokyo called the Lightweight Language Ring (LLRing), held in a real boxing ring. It included a number of famous Japanese programmers, the creator of Ruby, a bot shootout, language updates, a panel on functional programming, and more. So I'd like to invite you to read Boxing in the LLRing.

The first half of the 4500 word article is more accessible to non-experts while the second half gets into more nitty gritty. Coverage of the Perl language update, bunches of Haskell and Javascript, a surprise announcement that Ruby's Matz is going to go into hiding to work on Yet Another Ruby VM (get that guy onto Parrot!!), and a mysterious connection between the naming of Ruby and Python, a talk at YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo in March, and the location of the good humored "boxing match" (The TCP/IP bot battle was in fact chaired by Shibuya Perl Mongers). See also the photos on Flickr)

And finally I attempted a followup of the YAPC presentation on Babel-17, which was a comparison of Perl to Ruby to psychoactive scifi computing languages... But I don't want to ruin the ending, please come over and take a look, and help me correct any mistakes! Anyway seemed like a good reason to finally install a blog of my own.

Even though the number of languages and frameworks exceeds twenty, it is certainly about Perl and many issues thought about by monks, especially how languages change the way you think about problems. The event site is all in Japanese, unlike the site for YAPC::Asia, but I found it an interesting look at Japanese developers, and that it includes many of the Japan-side stars of the recent YAPC may be of interest to people who came all the way to Japan for it (Larry, Damian and Ingie among others came in March).

Even though it is lengthy I don't have anywhere in particular to post it besides PerlMonks, so if anyone has a good idea about that I'd like as many people as possible to contribute to an English language discussion of some of the things that were covered at LLRing. Especially now that Perl is advancing and Parrot and Pugs are on the rise, I hope you agree it is timely. Looking forward to your comments!

In reply to Boxing in the LLRing by mattr

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