The Qore Language ... for Perl Programmers

This was an unusual technical meeting, because we had two technical presentations and 4 lightning talks.

The first presentation was The Qore Language ... for the Perl Programmer by Brett Estrade. Brett explained that the Qore programming language has syntax that is similar enough to Perl to make it an easy transition for most Perl programmers. The language itself contains native features that match the functionality of standard Perl modules.

The killer feature for Qore over Perl is its support for concurrency. Perl's threading support has always been somewhat less than impressive. The design of Qore supports threads as a native feature.

The slides from Brett's talk are available on Google Docs.

Bit Hacks on IP Ranges

The second presentation was Jake Gelbman's discussion of Bit Hacks on IP Ranges. This talk was more low-level than our average technical presentation. Most of the time we do not talk about twiddling bits in Perl. Jake discussed different methods of representing a range of IPv4 addresses. Then, he showed approaches to converting the range notation into an actual set of IPv4 addresses.

Jake's slides are available as a Vroom presentation. This is just a formatted text file, so if you don't have Vroom installed, the presentation is still readable.

Both talks held the attention of the audience, generating a number of questions, observations, and discussions.

Lightning Talks

Finally, we had a series of lightning talks. As usual, lightning talks are limited to 5 minutes and may or may not have any slides. The talks were:

Although the lightning talks were mostly good, the response was more subdued than for the main two talks.

We had 19 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.