Holger’s weblog

Larry Wall at the ICCM

June 10th, 2006

I’m in Upland, Indiana for the annual International Conference on Computing and Missions (ICCM) this year, together with a lot of OM’s IT staff. The entire Linux team actually drove all the way from Pennsylvania yesterday, which is where my colleague Matt and his wife live. We arrived just in time for introductions and it was kind of fun when a guy stood up, claiming he’d just “wandered in”… it was actually Larry Wall, this year’s keynote speaker, who I’m sure you’ve heard of if you’re a techie… maybe not if you’re a Christian just generally interested in technology.

Larry actually trained to be a linguist with Wycliffe, the Bible translators, but then couldn’t go out on the mission field for health reasons. So instead, he developed the Perl programming language. This morning he gave the first keynote speech and there are a couple more to follow… this one was great fun. In typical Larry style, he introduced the topic of his speech as “Seeking a pe(a)rl of great price”, while saying that he really didn’t want to spiritualize Perl too much. It was very interesting to hear about a programming language from a linguist’s perspective and he certainly made it a lot of fun, while at the same time making fun of a lot of other programming languages in a very intelligent way. I’m definitely looking forward to his talk tomorrow. Funny side thing – he actually ended up in prayer group #42

Right now I’m actually sitting in a Windows Vista demonstration and I’m very unimpressed with what I’ve seen so far… well, I guess I’ll never become a Windows guy at heart. Anyway, they say the conference is really all about the food and lunch is not too far away anymore, so I’d better get this posted and get ready.

Technorati Tags: ICCM, missions, technology, IT, Linux, Perl, Larry Wall

Entry Filed under: News,Technology