Well, last night I attended probably one of the most entertaining and informative talks in my life. Damian Conway was (is) in Dallas, Texas, delivering two presentations to the D/FW Perl Mongers. Since the venue was only a 30 minute drive from home, I decided to attend (plus to hear another Aussie accent here in Texas!!).

First, let me say that if you ever get the opportunity to hear Damian, cancel everything else and do yourself a favour. He is an excellent speaker, and can make even dull and deadly boring subjects like quantum machanics so funny - seriously, I thought that one of the attendees was about to wet himself he was laughing so much.

So, what did the talk cover, and what has it to do with Perl? There are four sections; Weird Science, Weird Computer Science, Weird Perl, and Weird Reality. Damien led us on a wild ride, starting with the Mars Bar theory of Quantum Physics, showed photographic evidence that Barbera Bush and Basil Fawlty were at an early Copenhagen Perl Mongers meeting, skirted around the issue of some German dude called Schrodinger who tried to kill his cat by putting it in a box wit a cylinder of cyanide, then to the wonderful world of Quantum Computing.

By this time, your brain has turned to jelly (either the Aussie Jelly or the American Jello), and is prepared to believe anything, that normally you would have to be smoking something you didn't get from the tobacco shop to believe. Toss in some some Canadian - US foreign poilicy comparisons, and you have the core of the module - the superposition operators of all and any.

In reality, my understanding is that this module makes it easier to perform operations on list of scalars - something like:

print "Success!!!\n"
    if ( all(@results) > $pass_value);
print "You blew it !!\n"
    if ( any(@results) < $pass_value);
[download]

Of course, these are merely scratching the surface of the module's capabilities. I decided, on the drive home, to work feverishly to repair the computer that didn't quite survive the journey from Australia to Texas, so I can have my Linux system going, just to play around with the module. While there are no significant performance advantages (at least, not until threads are working properly), by using this module where you are doing operations on lists of values, particularly set type operations, the design and readibility of your code should be vastly improved.

Conclusion

If you have the chance to see Damian present this talk (or any other) - see it. This man has forgotten more Perl that I have ever learnt. It is rare that us mere mortals can literally sit at the feet of the Gods - to me it was well worth while.