OSSbarcamp, and trying out a new idea, and a bad habit

I went to http://www.ossBarCamp.com/ in Dublin on Saturday; an enjoyable and relaxed chance to meet up with more geeks than I usually get a chance to. I was quite late in signing up, but put myself down to do a lightning talk anyway, despite not having time to prepare — if I’m interested in something, I’ll have something to say about it anyway. So I made a quick and very informal presentation about http://www.nongnu.org/muesli, and as it seemed to be going OK I carried on into a speculative bit about mixed-language evaluation, which I had just realized I could do entirely within the Muesli library, albeit not as efficiently as if I got at the interpreters’ parsers and added a new construct to each language. The idea is to pre-process the program text, converting a construct such as
{{perl: …. some perl … {{python: ….some python in the middle of the perl…}} … more perl … {{scheme: … a bit of scheme inside it too…}}… more perl…}}
into the outer language with a call to eval_in_language replacing the funny syntax shown above. It went down well, so on Sunday I implemented most of, staying up on the computer much later than I intended, which brings me back to the self-improvement aspect of this blog… I must break the habit of staying too long, fascinated, at the computer.
Anyway, the BarCamp was good, and it was nice to meet up with people I already knew, and with people I didn’t. I’m so much more comfortable “among my own kind” than with the general public, especially at densities of more than 4 people per square mile.