QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Presentation: "Life, The Universe, and Everything"

Time: Wednesday 09:00 - 09:50 / Location: Fleming

"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."
-- The Undiscovered Country, 1991.

Take another mind-altering journey to the outer limits of programming as Damian explores:

  • The unlikely convenience of quantum finite state automata
  • The demonic power of Maxwell's information engine
  • The computational expressiveness of (un)natural languages

...blending them all into a simple self-describing massively parallel auto-visualizing superpositional proof-by-simulation system that spans six centuries of the computational arts.

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Damian Conway, Perl Boffin, Thoughtstream

Damian Conway

Biography: Damian Conway

Damian Conway is a well-known member of the international Perl community. A widely sought-after speaker and teacher, he is also the author of several technical books as well as numerous Perl software modules.

He runs an international IT training company - Thoughtstream - which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia. Until 2010 he was also an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University.

Over the past decade most of his spare time has been spent working with Larry Wall on the design and promotion of the new Perl 6 programming language.

Other technical and academic areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.

Software Passion: Building smarter software with more graceful interfaces.
Website: damian.conway.org
Software: CPAN mirror
Books: "Object Oriented Perl", Manning Publications, 2001, "Perl Best Practices", O'Reilly Media, 2005, "Perl Hacks", O'Reilly Media, 2006 (co-author)