---
title: Post-PLIBMTTBHGATY Portland Précis
teaser: 'Earlier this month we organized our first event in Portland: Programming
  Languages I''ve Been Meaning To Try But Haven''t Gotten Around To Yet.

  '
tags: portland
author: Bernerd Schaefer
published_on: 2016-03-29
---

We recently organized our first event in Portland: <abbr title="Programming
Languages I've Been Meaning To Try But Haven't Gotten Around To Yet.">
PLIBMTTBHGATY</abbr>. 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!

<figure>
  <img
    src="https://images.thoughtbot.com/post-plibmttbhgaty-pdx-precis/uPvWluxpT1O1qWhwqzME_coders-at-work.jpg">
  <figcaption>PLIBMTTBHGATYers learning Haskell, Ruby, Clojure, and more in
  Simple's offices.</figcaption>
</figure>

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!

  [Simple]: https://www.simple.com/
  [Katherine Fellows]: https://twitter.com/kf
  [Katrina Owen]: https://twitter.com/kytrinyx
  [Laila]: https://twitter.com/malandr1na
  [Gabe]: https://twitter.com/gabebw
  [exercism]: http://exercism.io/

---

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](http://www.braveclojure.com/).

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.

  [Caesar cipher]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher

## Haskell

Some Haskellers went through [Learn You a
Haskell](http://learnyouahaskell.com/) 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!