The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 in Las Vegas

More Regular Expression Voodoo.In the previous conferences, we looked at solving Sudokus and
the N-Queens problem with regular expressions.

In this talk, we take what we have learned the past years, and
apply our learnings to solve different puzzles.

Star Battles, Binaries and Suguru will be among the puzzles we'll
be solving using regular expressions.Audience: All["Perl", "Fun", "Regular Expressions"]

All games are not created equal. In some games the house edge should rightly keep you from even trying. But which games come close to a level playing field? If you are going to play, at least have a fighting chance.An overview of casino gaming.

Learn how to play several casino games.
Learn how to play smartly to avoid some really bad math.
What kind of house advantage is built in against you?
How much "homework" must you do to get ready?
Which games are entirely luck, and where can you maybe gain an edge?Audience: All["Fun"]

One-liners aren't just for gurus and obfuscated Perl contests. Anyone can learn a few simple command-line switches and instantly become more productive. You too can become a command-line ninja!Perl's got a reputation for producing unreadable, unmaintainable code. In some cases that's probably well-deserved, and TPC is filled with talks on modules and techniques that try to rein in some of that complexity. That's great, but sometimes people can forget that Perl's still a great language for throwing together quick and dirty little programs. And nothing is quicker or dirtier than the one-liner.

This talk is an introduction to writing one-liners in Perl. The focus isn't so much on Perl golf, but rather on getting a handle on all those command-line switches described in [perlrun](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html#Command-Switches) so you can add them to your development toolbox. So if you can never remember the difference between `-l`, `-n` and `-p`, this is the talk for you. If you're new to Perl, you'll be amazed at how much you can accomplish. Even if you already write the occasional one-liner in Perl, chances are you're not taking advantage of all the tricks and shortcuts you could be.Audience: All["Perl", "one-liners", "command-line"]

I'll be talking about hiring, training, mentoring and growing people to become (Perl) developers in an environment that's remote first, or hybrid. This talk is aimed at anyone who makes hiring decisions, leads or manages developer teams, or who mentors people at work or in an open source setting.It's been exceedingly difficult for many businesses to recruit new Perl developers. We all know this. It's getting harder. People retire or move on to different languages as the market evolves. But lots of businesses still luckily rely on Perl, and there is an appetite for more developers. Sadly, not many new ones are organically popping up. So we need to help.

In this talk, I will condense what I've learned in my 15+ years of experience hiring, training and retaining junior Perl developers. The market and the work environment has changed, and we're mostly all working remote now. This brings unique challenges and opportunities for hiring, training and mentoring, as well as working as a developer or a manager of developers in general.

We're going to look at how to attract, screen, interview and hire talented, motivated young people, how to get them interested in Perl, and how to mentor and train them up to be not just junior developers, but ultimately strong, independent thinkers and valuable contributors to your team, and sometimes the Perl community as well.

While my experience is based on the German and UK market, there are a lot of strengths in both education systems that can be utilised in the US market as well. Audience: All["Perl", "Community", "Beginner Talk"]

This talk covers a selection of modules Chad has written, or enjoys using. None of these modules or topics justify their own talk, but a talk covering a collection of them may provide valuable tools for people.This talk covers a selection of modules Chad has written, or enjoys using. None of these modules or topics justify their own talk, but a talk covering a collection of them may provide valuable tools for people. Modules include: goto::file, Atomic::Pipe, Importer, DBix::QuickDB, and possibly more.Audience: All["Perl"]

Creating SQL queries with placeholders is a must. But composing strings with interpolation is easier and better to read.

How about combining the best of both worlds?# Hold My Place - Automating SQL placeholders by de-interpolating strings

Many are still composing their SQL queries dangerously by assembling their queries with string interpolation.

Not only are such queries slow and prone to errors, they are also loopholes for injections.

But many legacy projects are full of such examples. And refactoring is often not easy.

And even today many developers choose interpolation, since it's a core feature in Perl and comfortable to use.

This talk shows a current project to convert such interpolations to placeholders, without losing the benefits of ease and expressiveness.

We will cover and explain some in-depth techniques like

- Callbacks in DBI.pm
- Manipulating variables with PadWalker.pm
- Bind variables with tie
- Overloading operators for objects

This is an extended and updated version of [my talk at YAPC::Europe & KohaCon'23 in Helsinki](https://perlkohacon.fi/Schedule.html#?talk_id=31)Audience: All["Perl", "SQL", "Interpolation", "Placeholder"]

How a 25 year old company is still using and backing Perl, and contributing back to the ecosystem.PayProp chose Perl over twenty years ago when they bootstrapped their business. Today the backend is still Perl, but has changed. This is a short talk about how we are modernising the stack and contributing back to open source software.

A short talk about some of the tools and techniques PayProp are using to modernise their Perl stack, including some of the issues and challenges. The areas covered will include:

* Moving from a CGI.pm based framework to Mojolicious
* Adding an ORM and business objects, via DBIx::Class and Moose
* Refactoring existing functionality with help from regression tests
* Contributing and maintaining distributions on CPAN
* Hiring developers and introducing them to Perl
Audience: All["Perl", "Open Source"]

Time to start thinking in Raku!
Have you:
* Written nested loops?
* Summed a list, or created a running total?
* Compared elements of one array to another array, or to the same array?
Raku's meta-operators do these (and much more) so concisely that it can change your thinking.
Come let me "wow" youYou are likely doing reduction, production, Cartesian cross-product, combinations, and zipping, even if you don't think in those terms.
In Raku, we have concise ways to express these tasks!

Yay!

...with operators so tight that they can change the way you think about your problem-solving!

Hooray! Large cheer!

...and often with two or three hard-to-distinguish ways to do it!

Woohoo!
Wait, what???

TIMTOWTDI, come find out when to use which way!

Presenting hyper-operators and meta-operators in a way that will move us from typical reactions of "Oh! Cool!" to actual adoption in everyday coding, by focusing on spotting the use-cases. For example, "When you see FOO, think BAR", where FOO might be nested loops walking the full span of the same array twice, and BAR would be the `X` operator.
Audience: Intermediate["Raku"]

Raku is a multiparadigmatic language. It supports out of the box functional, procedural, declarative, and object-oriented programming. But to date, there is no way to work with formal logic like one can in Prolog or other logical programming languages. Learn how this is changing!Raku does not support logical programming out of the box. Logic programming is also fairly distinct in how it works relative to other languages. Is there a way to marry Raku's extensive support for other paradigms with the logical one? This talk explores one approach and proposes a syntax that introduces a new twigil `$-foo` along with a naïve solver to begin exploration in the fascinating world of logical programming.Audience: Intermediate["Raku", "Polyglot"]

Raku has lots of different ways to work with logic. From short circuits to junctions and the word logic operators. Learn how they all work and play together.This talk with discuss the various types of logic that can be handled in Raku. Beginning with simple true/false, it will progress towards short circuit operators like `&&` or `||`, and then move to the alpha/word variants `and` and `or` to describe how they work differently. The talk will also touch on junctions (create with `&`, `all`, `|`, `any`, etc.) to round off the treatment of the topic.Audience: Beginner["Raku", "Beginner Talk", "Logic"]

People enjoyed last year's closures talks. This one goes further into applying closures with basic from Perl5 & extensions in Raku.Perl has "First Class" subs, but too few people realize what and how useful they are in both general and OO code. Last year we looked at some basic definitions, this talk looks at ways to apply closures in Perl5 & Raku for fun and profit for writing re-usable or more easily configurable code.Audience: Intermediate[]

The "testing culture" in Raku is an important part of both the language and its culture. This talks looks at some basics of writing tests in Raku using the command line tools and language features.This was given a few years ago, since then details of Raku have changed to look a bit more Raku-ish. This would be an updated talk including newer language features & test modules. Audience: All["Perl6 Testing"]