You can find info from Alex Miller’s talk on the Sun research language Project Fortress here:
And you can find info from Scott Bale’s talk on Fan here:
If you’re interested in catching future video, you can catch the feed from blip.tv or we’re on iTunes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
Should be a blast! Coming up in the next few months we already have a fantastic line-up of talks and speakers:
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.
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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.
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This Thursday, April 2nd is the April meeting of the Lambda Lounge. We’ll be grooving on two totally new topics for the lounge: the concatenative language Factor and the Parrot VM.
First, local polyglot Kyle Cordes will be giving a talk on the Factor language. Factor is a concatenative language where functions are always applied postfix to the values on the stack. Factor has an object system similar to CLOS in Lisp and concurrency functionality inspired by message-passing in languages like Erlang.
Other concatenative languages that I’ve heard of are Joy and Forth (there are others of course). Here are a pair of good articles on Joy (by two of my favorite bloggers Debasish Ghosh and Daniel Spiewak) which may be reminiscent of what we will see in Factor. I’m looking forward to learning more in the talk.
Second, Charles Sharp will be giving a talk about Parrot, the VM that has grown out of the now mythic Perl 6. However, Parrot 1.0 was just released on March 17th, so this is a very timely talk. Even though Parrot grew out of Perl 6 ideas, it is intended to support many dynamic languages and a number of languages are currently working in some form on Parrot. [I note that there are implementations of both Forth and Joy on Parrot, hinting at some grand unification talk here. 
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As always, this should be an epic fun and geeky event and I any and all in sight of St. Louis to check it out.
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Tagged: concatenative, Factor, meeting, Parrot
This week at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge, we’ll get a double-dose of functional programming and it should be a great night. The meeting is on Thursday March 5th at 6 pm at the offices of our kind hosts, Appistry. As always, the meeting is free and open to all.
First up we’ll have Ken Sipe, well-known speaker and author, giving us the rundown on F#, the new functional object hybrid language from Microsoft. I’ve seen Ken speak a bunch of times and he’s always worth seeing, as you’d expect from a No Fluff Just Stuff tour veteran.
I’ve been looking at a lot of F# lately and I find it to be a really impressive language. It reminds me in many ways of Scala, which is walking vaguely similar territory by pushing a hybrid functional approach on the JVM. F# comes out of the OCaml tradition. We saw Ryan Senior give us a great introduction to OCaml at the December meeting. I have no doubt that Ken will give us a great intro and some interesting opinions on FP as well.
Following that we’ll have the incomparable and ineffable Michael Easter doing a talk with the curious title “Monads are Burritos”. What does it mean? Will Michael pierce the veil of monadic obscurity with a new metaphor based on the flour tortilla of spicy goodness? You won’t know if you don’t check it out. I expect we’ll see some Haskell in this talk (for the first, but certainly not the last time at a Lambda Lounge) and I’m confident Michael’s talk will enlighten and entertain.
If you’re in the St. Louis area, a geek would be hard-pressed to find a juicier night of entertainment. That is of course, unless you happen to be partaking in the NFJS Gateway Software Symposium this weekend where Ken and many other fabulous speakers will be doing their thing. If you’re coming in from the outlying areas, why not come in one night earlier and get a free teaser? Everyone is welcome….
If you can’t catch us this month, meetings are the first Thursday of every month and we’ve got lots more great talks already scheduled.
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Tagged: F#, Haskell, meeting, monads
The February meeting is just around the corner this coming Thursday February 5th at 6 pm.
On tap for this month:
Nate will be talking about some aspects of the Lambda Calculus and how they can be implemented in Javascript and how to use method chaining/continuation passing to develop event-driven web pages.
Alex will be talking about actor concurrency, which is a different model for concurrency than the more common shared state and locks model that is prevalent today. It’s based on processes (light-weight user-space threads) and message-passing. Erlang is probably the best-known language to embrace actor concurrency and will be the focus of the examples.
More info:
Hope to see you there!
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Tagged: actor concurrency, Erlang, Javascript, meeting
The January meeting was held last night and about 40 people showed up, so another great turn-out. I think the presentations from Mario, David, and Mark were all fun topics and I learned a lot. I blogged at much greater length what transpired so I won’t repeat it here. Many thanks to all for coming out!
Stop in next month (February 5th) for talks on Actor concurrency (from me) and functional programming in Javascript from Nate Young.
Thanks everyone for getting the group off to a solid first couple months…
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Tagged: Clojure, Javascript, meeting, Objective-C, Ruby
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