I went to Damian’s talk yesterday, and only thereafter did I realize that his “scary hacker” & “mad scientist of Perl” monikers are not unfounded. I do not wish to spoil his future talks so I won’t go into too much detail, but here’s an abstract of what he talks about:

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross- dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft’s new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

It might sound strange (and scary), but he indeed covers all the topics stated above.

Without ado, Damian started his laugh-your-ass-off presentation, with pokes here and there to all manners of programming languages. E.g. “… all civilized languages use the curly braces to mark the… oh wait i can hear a sssssssssssssssssssssssss… must be the python users”, “Lisp is a delicate mixture of porridge and toe-nail clippings…”.

The point of the talk was to demonstrate that “languages shape the way we think” (a direct quote) and that there is value in learning many languages (even dead ones). Current programming languages are based off the Von Neumann architecture and this hasn’t always been the case, and it won’t be so forever. We should not totally forget about functional programming and logic programming because they give us a way to think differently, allowing us to have a clearer view of the big picture, and making more informed decisions.

That said, one fun thing I learnt yesterday is this: spucatum tauri (Latin for Bullshit).

Thursday, July 6th, 2006 @ 1:11 pm software
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