The Swine Before Perl

In November 2001 I gave an invited talk at the inaugural Lightweight Languages conference that has since become somewhat notorious (in netspace, it is said to be kickassing genial).

DrDobb's Journal was kind enough to record the conference and professionally edit the tracks. They unfortunately misplaced the audio track, and said they were unable to locate the backups. In cyberspace, however, nothing is ever lost; as Linux Torvalds said, “Real Men don't make backups. They upload it via ftp and let the world mirror it.”

So, here are the slides (PPT, PDF), and here is the audio.

Many thanks to Leo Comerford and Edi Weitz for their help and persistence.

There is also an expository paper that elaborates on the example developed in this talk.

Finally, if you enjoy this kind of material, you may be interested in my free textbook on programming languages.

N.B.: The copyright of the audio track is presumably owned by Dr. Dobb's, and they haven't given me permission to mirror it here. Contacting their editors has, however, yielded no response, and I expect they would rather it be available somewhere than nowhere at all. Their original page, which includes a rather dramatic photograph, ostensibly has a link to the audio track, but the link doesn't work.