On February 17, 2011 at 11:00, Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, will give a talk in Povo (where I work), organized by CoSBI (The Microsoft Research – University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology).
The title is “That Goes Without Saying (or Does It)” and the abstract is:
Linguist Roman Jakobson famously said, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’ Contrary to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, your language of choice does not generally prevent you from thinking certain thoughts, but your language can certainly make it easier or harder to express those thoughts. Lately I’ve enjoyed playing with various Perl examples on rosettacode.org, and have noticed this principle in action. In this talk we’ll look at some of the ways a language can make your life more miserable than it needs to be.
The seminar is free of charge but for logistics reasons you need to confirm your attendance on CoSBI site.