It was my first YAPC and quite interesting, if anything I wished all the sessions were longer. Also it was held on weekdays so I couldn't see all the sessions. Larry, Damian and others came from overseas plus there were many Japanese presenters. In fact, all seats sold out in 5 days, and I was only able to get in by sneaking over to the English registration page (an intentional loophole I heard). O'Reilly and Japanese companies including Hatena.ne.jp (a blog site) and Mixi.jp (a social networking site), Yahoo! Japan, Six Apart, Cybozu Labs (business software) and Brazil (razil.jp, they make open source software including the full text search engine Senna and the web crawler Xango, and search big chat sites) were sponsors. I heard it was done on a shoestring, without making profit themselves (except O'Reilly's table selling a ton of Japanese Perl books, which was nice to see).

So I guess it costs quite a lot to put one of these things on, since it was about 40 bucks for the two days and then another 40 for the (very delicious Chinese style) dinner. The show was held in Kamata, which is on the Southern side of Tokyo between the Yamanote loop line and the ocean, and is a bit on the industrial side perhaps. The building itself was a wild postmodern sculpture that looked like a fragment fell off of an alien spaceship, and I was glad they didn't pick someplace in the middle of say Shibuya since that would undoubtedly have added a lot to the entrance fee. I'd say it was well worth what I paid.

However we also got free two great T-shirts and a nice umbrella in a Yahoo! Japan bag! Also I took advantage of it being in a community hall where a library offered lots of Internet time for under $1 (best kept secret at YAPC::Asia I'm sure) and also there was WLAN which apparently worked for everyone but Ingy. One interesting thing was that the sponsors were also developers and very approachable, and they are both good-sized services that use Perl. Also there were a bunch of Livedoor people there, Livedoor is a big portal site and also infamous for its currently imprisoned management. In particular I was happy to see Catalyst being used heavily (I think it was in Hatena?) and with additional modules developed for it. My only problem was that since I shuttled between that talk (Catalyst Everywhere, IIRC) and Ingy's "Wikiwyg" talk, so I probably missed the best parts of both.

Incidentally I had also attended some months ago Lightweight Language Day and Night which was fantastic and had a great T-shirt (also O'Reilly sponsored). LL brought together "scripting language people" from perl, python, ruby, smalltalk, and so on, which enabled a cool JAPH-like competition to see how each language worked out (smalltalk was the neatest I think with an animated output). So YAPC had some of the same people there I'm sure, and indeed with Ruby coming from Japan it was mentioned prominently by a number of speakers, including Larry who said that Ruby took the best from Perl5 and now Perl6 was taking the best from Ruby and then some. Also interesting was Larry's summarization of many languages in a single sentence expressing an idiosyncracy of each language's designer and how the language makes you think. So while Prolog was "Everything is a theory", and Perl was IIRC "TMTOWTDI", Python was IIRC "There is only one way to do it, our way." I guess there is a good deal of rivalry with the Python camp still.

If another is held again it would be nice if demos could be given, if presentations could be longer or more numerous, and if there was a way to network with other participants. Even so there was a strong sense of individual personalities, especially with Ingy's talks (including a lot of Javascript and making things "wierd enough") and a trend in which many presenters took on Takahashi's challenge by making their slides use 200 point fonts (Larry says, "Takahashi it!") and a big dose of humor. I didn't know there wouldn't be simultaneous translation (no budget) but would have volunteered if I'd known, however between the subtitles and lots of bilingual people I think everybody came away satisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.

A lot of Perl6 was discussed, as something which is going to be great and can already be used in parts now in Perl5, and there was apparently a Perl6 Hackathon held after the YAPC, though this was not it seems a very public event so I don't know the results of that yet.

If you want to brush up on your Japanese you may like to check out the audio (and maybe video later). I know I am hoping to see slides of some sessions I missed too. Now I know what the fervor about YAPC is all about, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to meet Larry and Damian and say "Thank You". I also got a chance to meet some great people on the Japan side, both Japanese and foreigners (including a programmer at NTT and another at a securities firm), and am sure this will make developing in Perl a lot more fun for me in the future too.