Saturday was the first /Burgh?/ Meetup, a get-together of the Harrisburg Perl Mongers and Pittsburgh Perl Mongers. It went pretty well, with a variety of neat talks.

Though I don't personally think I'll end up using it, we got a good overview of Interchange. Shana pointed out that one of our friends who runs a music store might have some luck with something like that, without requiring us to write all that functionality from scratch. Hmm, maybe. Chris spoke about generating Java from Perl. While it was pretty neat, at first I didn't think I'd be able to use it. I'm lucky enought to be using Perl at work, I don't need to generate code for other languages. But then I remembered cgi::application::generator does exactly that. Though I don't currently use it, the point is that there are cases where one might even want to generate Perl code from Perl code. So, I'll be keeping an eye open for where that could be put to use :-)

I had a fun Lightning Talk on Pittsbughese, with a corresponding module that will convert one's program to Pittsburghese by simply using the module. It's called Lingua::Dialects::Pittsburghese. It's currently quite simple, but I learned about how to use Filter::Simple, which was pretty cool :-)

We had a lot of fun, and it sounds like we're all hoping to do it again. Maybe we'll even invite more folks next time. That is, maybe we can invite the guys from Philadelphia, or even the Baltimore group.