I found a summary report of YAPC::Asia.
http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=540854
O'Reilly and Japanese companies including Hatena.ne.jp (a blog site) and Mixi.jp (a social networkingsite), Yahoo! Japan, Six Apart, Cybozu Labs (business software) and Brazil (razil.jp, they make opensource software including the full text search engine Senna and the web crawler Xango, and search bigchat sites) were sponsors.
O'Reilly and many Japanese companies sponsored the Conference.
One interesting thing was that the sponsors were also developers and very approachable, and they are both good-sized services that use Perl. Also there were a bunch of Livedoor people there, Livedoor is a big portal site and also infamous for its currently imprisoned management. In particular I was happy to see Catalyst being used heavily (I think it was in Hatena?) and with additional modules developed for it. My only problem was that since I shuttled between that talk (Catalyst Everywhere, IIRC) and Ingy's "Wikiwyg" talk, so I probably missed the best parts of both.
Sponsors were also developers and provide good services using Perl.
So YAPC had some of the same people there I'm sure, and indeed with Ruby coming from Japan it wasmentioned prominently by a number of speakers, including Larry who said that Ruby took the bestfrom Perl5 and now Perl6 was taking the best from Ruby and then some. Also interesting was Larry'ssummarization of many languages in a single sentence expressing an idiosyncracy of each language'sdesigner and how the language makes you think. So while Prolog was "Everything is a theory", andwas IIRC "TMTOWTDI", Python was IIRC "There is only one way to do it, our way." I guess thereis a good deal of rivalry with the Python camp still.
Other light weight languages people were also there. Many people told about Ruby (from Japan).
I didn't know there wouldn't be simultaneous translation (no budget) but would have volunteered if I'dknown, however between the subtitles and lots of bilingual people I think everybody came awaysatisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.
No simultaneous translation, but satisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.
Now I know what the fervor about YAPC is all about, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to meet Larryand Damian and say "Thank You". I also got a chance to meet some great people on the Japan side, both Japanese and foreigners (including a programmer at NTT and another at a securities firm), andam sure this will make developing in Perl a lot more fun for me in the future too.
I feel envious that he could say "Thank You".
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