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All things considered, Damians Conway’s talk is Yet Another Perl6 Promotion (YAPP), but a damn fun one.  Highlighting some very funky new features that Perl 6 makes happen, in constant time. Theoretically.

Conway is one of the best speakers I’ve seen so far. His talks have speed, passion, a big dose of absurd humor and loads of geek references. If you have the chance to attend one of his talks: go see him, you won’t be disappointed, promise.

The talks starts with a lighthearted refresh of the history of quantum mechanics, unexpected revelations about Bohrs activities in modeling and winter sports and so on.
When the audience is under his spell Conway dives a bit deeper and shows many examples of Perl 6′s more natural syntax, and possible uses of superpositions. Showing how superpositions -called Junctions in Perl 6, are not just reserved for mad scientists. Junctions might be damn useful for programmers; replacing contrived nested for loops with elegant code generating prime’s, testing list membership, doing string comparison, all the while letting Perl take care of parallelization automagically, in constant time. Theoretically.

A very simple example showing the power of superpositions, in Perl 5, taken from the description page of Quantum::Superpositions.pm:

$ideal = any( all("tall", "rich", "handsome"),
all("rich", "old"),
all("smart","Australian","rich")
);

Operations involving such a composite superposition operate recursively and in parallel on each its states individually and then recompose the result. For example:

while (@features = get_description) {
if (any(@features) eq $ideal) {
print "True love";
}
}

The any(@features) eq $ideal equality is true if the input characteristics collectively match any of the three superimposed conjunctive superpositions. That is, if the characteristics collectively equate to each of “tall” and “rich” and “handsome”, or to both “rich” and “old”, or to all three of “smart” and “Australian” and “rich”.

Find a good description of the concepts here, and most of the examples used in his talk on here but you’ll miss the funky Perl 6 rewrites of them. Junctions are documented in the Perl 6 documentation here.

Start using Superpositions/Junctions in Perl 5 by installing the Quantum::Superpositions module from CPAN. The module is currently maintained by Steven Lembark, and will only add the “any”, “all” and “eigenstate” operators. For a more up to date implementation with more junction operators and autothreading fetch Perl 6 by installing Raduko.

Can’t wait until Conway returns for part II: Time::Space::Continuum!

Robert “RSnake” Hansen has written a wonderfull peace about what Startrek can tell us about future IT security

Virtualization security is an oxymoron – even in the distant future: I mean, really, how many times has the whole damned ship been taken over by some overzealous holodeck character? Whoever wrote the holodeck hypervisor really needs to be put in a room with Warf for a few hours so he can explain with his batleth what the need for true physical and logical isolation is. Why some Sherlock Holmes character should have access to main memory, I’ll never know. Too bad we aren’t smart enough in the distant future to think about hardware isolation instead of relying exclusively on dangerously faulty software.

You should really check it out have a laugh and then think about it…