Lambda Lounge

This Thursday November 5th will be a Haskell hackfest music jam session held at Technology Partners (NOT Appistry as usual). map

SuperCollider is a real-time audio-synthesizer server with great Haskell bindings. People have done some pretty amazing things with it. Basically it is a server that speaks the Open Sound Control binary protocol and produces any sound you can imagine. Using the metaphor of an audio mixer, each client runs on a different channel so we will truly be jamming real-time.

I can provide a server with SuperCollider pre-loaded and client computers can easily install the bindings using Haskell Platform and Cabal. Clients do not need to have SuperCollider installed.

This meeting will be sponsored by Technology Partners.

Hope to see you there!

The September meeting is nearly upon us and it promises not to disappoint.  Not since “The Sound and the Fury” tour of Clapton and Vaughan have two titans been paired up in a universe-realigning, consciousness-altering, anomaly  of sights, sounds, and smells.  Local Groovy/Grails sage and accomplished ventriloquist, Jeff Brown, will be exploring the many powerful metaprogramming capabilities of Groovy.

Also gracing the podium this month will be Tim Dalton (yes, *the* Tim Dalton), Scala expert, just back from receiving an Honorary Doctorate in Pantomime from the Sorbonne.  What has two thumbs and will be presenting on external DSLs using Scala parser combinators?

         o_ This Guy _o
        /              \

This month’s food sponsor is Lisa Rokusek of AgentHR.  Please come out to the Appistry offices for what should be a great night!

Another great meeting is planned for Thursday night! First up, Matt Follett will be talking about Perl and how despite rumors to the contrary, it’s not dead yet. Should be an interesting talk.

The second talk this month will be Aditya Siram talking about Haskell’s Software Transactional Memory system. We’ve looked at STMs in passing with other languages like Clojure and Fortress. It will be good to focus on it with Haskell and really explore it in detail.

Come on out Thursday night at the Appistry offices as usual. Meeting starts at 6 pm.

You can find info from Alex Miller’s talk on the Sun research language Project Fortress here:

• Slides
• Video

And you can find info from Scott Bale’s talk on Fan here:

• Slides (coming soon)
• Video

If you’re interested in catching future video, you can catch the feed from blip.tv or we’re on iTunes.

This month at the Lambda Lounge (Thursday, July 2nd, 6 pm), we will bringing you two NEW languages that start with F.

First, Alex Miller will be introducing you to a research language called Fortress aimed at people doing scientific computation on large (peta-size) systems. It is a language that explicitly tries to meet the challenge of running systems up to a million cores and is “infested” with parallelism. This is a language for tomorrow.

Next, Scott Bale will be talking about the Fan programming language. This language takes the best of languages like Java and C#, throws out the cruft, and bleeds in some modern features.

Should be a great night with two languages making their debut at the Lounge.

Thursday evening (6/4/09) is the next gathering of the St. Louis Lambda Lounge and it promises to be an evening of geektacity the likes of which has not been seen for roughly 30 days.  Local functional-programming guru and all-around tall guy Alex Stangl will be holding court on a Haskell implementation of the Vending Machine spec written for the May Shootout.  Mortals, prepare to have your puny brains expanded!

Whatever remains of the audiences’ capacity for rational thought after Alex has delivered his concession-stand automata master work will be thoroughly obliterated by the awesome and terrifying MacRuby –prettiest and most blood-thirsty of all current Ruby-language implementations.  Mario Aquino will introduce MacRuby, using several code examples to highlight rich user interface features made available to Ruby programs on that platform.

Mario’s wife Anna is a photographer and was at the May shootout meeting taking some pictures. Below are some of the shots. Great stuff!! Many many thanks to her for capturing the mood.

This Thursday at 6 pm, we’ll be doing the very first Lambda Lounge Language Shootout! Everyone is working on a version of a Vending Machine problem in different languages and we’ll be looking through the code from everyone’s examples.

At this point it looks like there are people actively working on examples in the following languages at least:

• Clojure
• Ruby
• Fan
• Groovy
• Haskell
• Python
• Perl 5

Should be a blast! Coming up in the next few months we already have a fantastic line-up of talks and speakers:

• June – rich client development with JRuby (Mario Aquino) and a Haskell overview (Alex Stangl)
• July – metaprogramming in Groovy (Jeff Brown) and a Fan overview (Scott Bale)
• August – Perl: Not Dead Yet (Matt Follett) and Haskell’s STM (Aditya Siram)

Lots of tasty language goodness there. If you’re in St. Louis (or even if you’re not), feel free to stop by and get your lambda on.

Thanks everyone for another great meeting last night. Kyle’s talk on Factor and Charles’ talk on Parrot/Pugs/Rakudo/Perl 6 were both entertaining and insightful.

Next month for the May meeting we’ll be doing our first language shootout! The problem at hand is a Vending Machine implementation (spec) and a number of folks have signed up on the Google group pages to develop implementations. The spec is intentionally vague as to how you drive your program (UI, command line, unit tests) to put the focus on implementing the problem.

Please update the Google group page as the month goes on so we can have an accurate picture of who’s doing what and whether or not you want to present. Once we have a good count we can decide the presentation format. The suggestions so far have been a series of short (10-15 minute) talks or an expo style where people can walk around.