Omaha Dynamic Language Users Group 2011.03.08

On 2011.03.08 I attended the Omaha Dynamic Language Users Group meeting.

http://odlug.org/

This was my first meeting with the group. I've been wanting to attend for about a year but have had class on Tuesdays for the last 6 months. With a break in the action from quarters at Metro I was able to hit this meeting as well as the OLUG meeting last week. The only bummer is I'll miss out on the trifecta this month since my class fires back up again tonite and thus I will be in class next Tuesday when the OJUG meeting is held.

Anyway, tonite was a great meeting. I met a couple new folks and was introduced to some new things I hadn't seen before.

Jay Hannah presented Test Driven Development in Perl. If you're not on the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/odynug

then the code for his presentation is here:

svn checkout https://clabsvn.ist.unomaha.edu/anonsvn/user/jhannah/UNO/Perl_TDD_Intro


I've done unit testing before, and sometimes it was test-driven, other times it was catchup-driven. That was all in Java, though, so it was nice to see Perl mechanisms for accomplishing this. Also I hadn't heard of TAP, or "Test Anything Protocol":

http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

which in a nutshell is a protocol for formatting between test mechanisms. For example, I could take the output of my Perl tests and read them with the TAP C interface, if I wanted to do that for some reason, perhaps if my main harness was in C and I wanted to combine output into one file, for example. I *think*, anyway -- if I got the gist of it right. I didn't delve too deeply into the specifics but that's what I got out of the cursory intro and peruse of the doc.

Next up Scott Hickey presented from chapter 5 of the Land of Lisp book. The example was a text-based sort of role-playing game, so we got to see what Lisp looks like and how some mapping of functions onto data works. Or as Scott puts it -- "MapReduce in the small".

So I am looking forward to June when I am hoping to take only online classes at Metro so my evenings will be freed up again and I can shoot for a monthly user group attendance trifecta for the summer months!