YAPC 10 kicked off Monday morning. Two of the organizers (Casey West and Dan Wright) started things off by regaling us with their tale of getting to and from YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto. The take-away message was when you’re travelling to a foreign country, take appropriate travel documentation. A drivers license doesn’t count.
After the opening spiel came Richard Dice, the president of The Perl Foundation, gave us an update on TPF and Perl over the past year. From someone who doesn’t follow TPF it looks like financially it’s doing fairly well. It’s a $200,000 donation from Ian Hague in May 2008, it received a $50,000 donation from booking.com, and received another $70,000 from other donations. It has given out grants to help support Perl 6 development, to Nick Clark to release Perl 5.8.9, and to David Mitchell to release Perl 5.10.1.
In March 2009 The Parrot Foundation was spun off from TPF.
TPF gave out five grands in each of the second and third quarters of 2008, two in the fourth quarter, and one in the first quarter of 2009. It’s sponsoring nine Google Summer of Code projects, up from five last year.
Over the past year, Perl 5 has moved to git for version control. Strawberry Perl, for running Perl on Windows, was released. Various Perl groups were formed, such as the Japan Perl Association and the Enlightened Perl Organization.
There were many Perl-related events over the past year, from OSCON to workshops and hackathons around the world.
After Richard, Larry Wall gave a keynote about error messages and how he’s making the ones in Perl 6 chatty.
After Larry, Jerry Gay from The Parrot Foundation gave a talk, and after him came Yaakov, telling new YAPCers to go talk to people.
