Slides (barely) available at:
http://www.dan.co.jp/yapc/taipei/2004/slides.html
Perl stands for ``Practical Extraction and Reporting Language'', or so it is supposed to. But that did not come true for many East Asian Languages (aka CJKV) until perl 5.8 -- the very thing it extracts and reports are text but perl could not swallow CJKV text till then.
In this session, Dan Kogai discusses how the perl communities, especially the communities in Japan, taught the camel how to grok non-(ascii|ISO-Latin1) text. It was not as simple as introducing Unicode.
Dan Kogai <dankogai@dan.co.jp>
is a (?:father of two|husband|entrepreneur|perl monger) (?# roughly by order of precedence). He is thankful to what's so-called LAMPs (Linux, apache, (?:mod_*|mysql), and Perl -- though he uses FreeBSD and Mac OS X more often) which helped us IPO ``Livin' on the Edge'' (now Livedoor in April, 2000 where he served as a Chief Technology Officer. He manages Encode.pm, the bulkiest perl core module, to pay back perl community which helped him pay off his mortgage :) He now works as a CTO of Alan corporation.
Listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, code 4753