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Having never been to one of these before, I was fairly excited to see what it had to offer. The talks seemed to be interesting and so did the food. Ben, our PHP developer, joined me for the evening. The turnout was very good, I didn’t do a headcount but it looked like more than the 27 dinner. A quick visual scan confirmed this was indeed a geek dinner.

It was held at The Wild Fig which seems like a very cosy venue, it’s a bit too close to Valkenberg for my liking and at one stage I thought one of their patients had escaped when I kept hearing ‘PAIRING’ coming from the back of the room (haha).

Some of the talks were incredibly boring, others rather extreme.

Bryn Drivey gave a talk on PHP vs Python and certainly caught everyones attention with his complete lambasting of PHP as a language. Ben and I had chosen to sit at his table so we had something to chat about at least. I found parts of his talk informative and other parts a bit over the top but he kept everyones attention which was good.

The ‘my language is better than yours’ argument is not exactly a new one and I think his talk could have introduced us to Python a little bit more than just a simple comparison sheet. I did the comparison of PHP to .NET (C#) so I was pretty aware of PHP ’s OO shortcomings already. It has made me more interested in looking at Python though which i suppose was his objective.

Nick Coyne from Glasshouse spoke about Ruby and I was surprised to hear about it’s enormous memory requirements. I suppose thats the tradeoff of writing 4 lines of code, sounds like .NET to me. I would definately look at Python before I touched Ruby.

Ian Gillfilan spoke about “MindGames” (AI vs Human) in games like Checkers and Chess. Apparently the game Go really gives AI a run for it’s money.

Finally Robin gave a talk on an open source project called Ripple. I won’t attempt an explanation as even he found it hard to explain so read about it here.

Would I recommend the dinner? Yes. There was also talk of organising another BarCamp in September so keep checking this wiki for details.