Davey Shafik has an interesting post to his site sharing some of his views on the "syntax" of different programming communities - PHP, Ruby, Python and Perl.

In my (almost) three years of being in a developer relations type role I have attended events in several communities and have observed how they differ from my primary community (PHP). As I’ve tried to understand those differences and the reasons behind them, I have had many discussions with members of many more communities also.

After attending my first PyCon (US) I was struck by just how welcoming and diverse the community is and had many conversations trying to understand why this is. This is not what this post is about. This post is about conferences specifically, and how communities place different priorities on different things when it comes to how they run, organize, speak at, and attend events.

He talks about conferences - both attending and speaking at them - and how the situation differs from community to community. He did some background research on why things are they way they are and how that has influenced the overall focus of the community.