use Perl

Last Thursday I stood before about 20 or so people at the South Birmingham LUG, and presented two talks about Perl. The first was an introductory talk, and the second a quick look at CPAN testing. Both talks seemed to go down very well, and there were some very good questions from the audience.

The evening was not without its problems, not least of which was me trying to get there in the first place. After waiting for over half an hour waiting at the bus stop, in which time 2 buses should have gone by, it started to rain. So I decided to take the car instead. Unfortunately, where I planned to park the car, was where the medical students were having their graduation day. Finally I got to the meeting only about 15 minutes late. My laptop decided it was going to take an age to render flat HTML pages, so I ended up using the organiser's laptop. Then the projector died ... twice! However, the stops did provide the opportunity for a few rounds of questions.

I got asked about OO in Perl, and pointed them to Damian's book. I also got asked an interesting question about what I get asked when selling a product to a customer. In the instances where I've been involved with selling a product to a customer, the main thing they were interested in was security. This then generated a good discussion about Perl's ability to taint data and SQL injection. The stickers on my laptop also caused a stir (particularly the 'Java, just say no!' one that I got from gnat a few years ago), and prompted a question of why you should use Perl over other languages. I did manage to get across the fact, that Perl is good at many other things than just CGI. In fact when asked whether you can write GUIs in Perl. I quite happily pointed them at Tk, and even mentioned all the graphics programming you can do with GIMP, GD and ImageMagick. They were suitably impressed. perl++ :)