Perl Conference 2.0, Continued

The Outer Ring: Perl People

The conference wasn't terribly diverse in terms of ethnicity or gender (though there was a higher percentage of women than the first year), but attendees did vary widely in industry backgrounds and "geek-ness." Looking at name tags and talking to people, you could find system administrators from stock market brokerages, programmers from government agencies, freelance consultants, and web developers from major web agencies. People I talked to indicated that Perl (and other "open source" or free software) was accepted in their organizations. Across industries, corporations have opened their eyes to the benefits of free tools, and have given the go-ahead (and money, in the form of conference fees) to use them. Of course, as Tim O'Reilly said in one of his speeches at the conference, many of these companies were already using freeware before the "suits" gave it their go-ahead. The suits just didn't know it.

I mention the "geek" factor because some might expect a conference like this to be full of socially maladjusted programmers who don't know how to deal with other human beings except from behind a computer screen. Given that the keynote speech contained numerous J.R.R. Tolkien references, and the first night's film festival consisted of Planet of the Apes and old episodes of Red Dwarf, it's not too hard to see there is a core Perl programming culture that possesses more of the geek factor than, say, mainstream society. But if you're avoiding technical conferences like this for fear there won't be anybody you can relate to, stop worrying. With the continuing acceptance of the language, it's no longer just a hard-core programming crowd (or a hard-core science fiction audience) that shows up. As long as your familiarity with the language covers Learning Perl, you'll be able to relate to your fellow attendees and probably understand the speakers.

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