We recently organized our first event in Portland: PLIBMTTBHGATY. It’s like an unconference for programming languages, a lightly-structured party for people to get together and try new languages. It’s a mouthful to pronounce, but a blast to attend!
I want to share some of what we learned, but first some thanks are in order.
Thank you Katherine Fellows and Simple for helping out and providing great space to play and learn!
Thank you Katrina Owen for exercism which made the process of learning a new language so rewarding!
Thank you Star Simpson for starting the PLIBMTTBHGATY movement!
And finally, thank you Laila for teaching me how to PLIBMTTBHGATY, and Gabe for traveling up from San Francisco to help out!
After a full day of breakfast and lunch, hanging out, and trying new things, we went around the room and each person shared what they had tried and one thing they took away. Here’s some of what we all did!
Clojure
The Clojurians were one of the larger groups. They went through Clojure for the Brave and True.
Some people had experience with other functional languages, and found Clojure’s different style of functional composition interesting. Others had used other Lisps and were (pleasantly!) surprised by all of the bracket types.
Go
The Gophers were working on two projects.
The first was a chat bot through which they learned about concurrency in Go. They also learned out to use the templating package. The other project was a Caesar cipher, which let them really get into how strings work.
Haskell
Some Haskellers went through Learn You a Haskell while others worked on exercism problems.
Many appreciated the new thought processes it exposed them to. For some, this was their first introduction to a statically typed language!
Elixir
The Elixirists (Elixers? Alchemists?) worked on exercism problems.
They greatly appreciated the language’s strong documentation. They also enjoyed learning about pattern matching and functions.
And more…
There were also groups that tried:
- Idris
- PHP
- Ruby
- Smalltalk
- Vim script
- Wolfram Language
In total, we tried at least 9 languages! It was a lot of fun, and great to meet so many new people.
We hope to see you at the next one!
