YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa – short summary

In very, very short words – it was awesome!

Talks were interesting, venue was comfortable, O’Reilly’s stand was well prepared, schedule was properly tailored, food was nice, people were fantastic, beer was tasty. Weather was good (well, compared to Amsterdam, almost every place provides nice weather) and the tower was leaning.

I really enjoyed talks about Perl 6, since Rakudo Star is already published and everyone was able to try the stuff from the presentation on his/her laptop. There was a lot of interesting information about signatures in Perl 6, presented by Jonathan Worthington: in Perl 6 you don’t have to unfold @_ manually anymore and you can have your parameters well typed. Yes, we can have strong typing! And you can define your types on the fly using the where keyword:

sub get_proper_answer ( Int $answer where 42:t ) {
    ...
}

And in case you desperately wanted – you can use Perl 6 signatures in Perl 5.

What else? If you lived under the rock recently, you would have to go to Pisa to get to know that Moose has reached version 1.0. However, you also would be able to meet a lot of people who was already using it (and liking it).

Not enough? Well, what about the opening keynote presented by Larry Wall with his family, and the closing keynote presented by Matt S. Trout with his new hair? Both were cool, being completely different though.

Want more? There was the most freaky, enthusiastic, robust and jolly community I’ve ever seen in my life – and I really enjoyed being part of it. So if you are freaky and enthusiastic as well, you will probably enjoy the next YAPC::EU in Riga.

This is only a short, chaotic summary, but I will try to organise my reminiscences into more detailed notes.