Also check out his lambda calculus evaluator and Space Invaders in lambda calculus!

Pizza will be provided by n3rds.com – check ‘em out!

Two great talks this month, as usual.  First up we’ve got Chris Gore talking about Evolutionary Algorithms in Lisp.  And then we have Jim Duey coming in from Kansas City to talk about DSLs in Clojure, a topic he’ll be talking about soon at Clojure/West.

Jay DeLong from RCGA will also be stopping by to give us a quick overview of some of the great startup stuff going on in St. Louis right now.  This is a pretty good overview …

John Leach will be talking about Hadoop and HBase.  John runs the St. Louis Hadoop User’s Group and is currently working on a cloud-based Hadoop marketing platform.  Hadoop is the Apache project for distributed storage and map/reduce and HBase is a BigTable-like database platform built on top of Hadoop.

David McNeil will be talking about “Building a DSL in Clojure For Controlling a Lego MindStorm/ Arduino Robot”.  As you might notice Lego MindStorm and Arduino are different platforms so this is really a talk about creating abstractions in Clojure.  And robots.  Robots!

Many thanks to Cloudera for sponsoring this month’s meeting.  If you’re interested in learning more about Hadoop, our very own Tom Wheeler is now working as an instructor for Cloudera and will be doing a class right here in St. Louis at the end of February.

Our first talk will be Ryan Senior giving us an introduction to logic programming with Clojure’s core.logic library.  Ryan has been delving deep into the black arts of Prolog, Kanren, and Clojure’s take on how to do logic programming and will give us a gentle introduction.

The second talk will be Alex Miller doing a non-technical talk called “Life and Death at the Dawn of Computing” exploring some interesting dualities during the birth of computing.

• Simple Made Easy: The Ramones – Jeff Sigmon
• Pattern Matching in F# – Jessica Kerr
• Galileo Was Wrong – Deech
• xmonad – Scott Bale
• Computational Geometry: Convex Hulls, Intersections, and Triangulations! Oh My! – Michael Schade
• Introduction to Cryptography – Tom Wheeler

Pizza will be provided by Technology Partners.

For those of you that have been attending Lambda Lounge for a while, this will be the 3 year anniversary of the first Lambda Lounge!  Hard to believe.  In 3 short years we’ve had talks in the following languages: Ocaml, Groovy, Clojure, Objective C, Ruby, JavaScript, Erlang, Haskell, F#, Perl 6, Factor, Python, Fan (now Fantom), Fortress, Scala, Piet, Ook, LOLCODE, Inform 7, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Lua, Kotlin, and of course Java.  Not to mention quite a few other topics besides!

That first meeting was awesome for me because I mashed together a bunch of groups of people I knew (plus a bunch of people I didn’t!) and find a common thread.  It was great to see all those smart people in one room.  Ryan Senior did a talk on OCaml and that was the first time that I met him – now he sits next to me at Revelytix and is an integral part of the Strange Loop team.  Matt Taylor also did a talk on Groovy – little did we know he would be on to bigger  things in California before we knew it.

For me personally Lambda Lounge was a place to explore new (to me) ideas of functional and dynamic programming languages.  Now I use a functional and dynamic language every day!

Many thanks to all for continuing to share at Lambda Lounge – I still love seeing everyone every month and miss it badly when I can’t make it.

• Ken Sipe – talking about the new JVM language Kotlin, a work in progress by JetBrains.  Ken interviewed Andrey Breslav about the language on the Strange Loop podcast.
• David Hollander – talking about building Asynchronous Servers in LuaJIT.  Learn more here.
• Pizza will be provided by Relay Technology.

As always, the meetings starts at 6 pm at 1099 Milwaukee in Kirkwood, MO.  Head in the east door (Milwaukee side) and down the stairs.

Pizza will be provided by Experis.

• James Carr on RabbitMQ
• David Difranco on Apache Thrift

• Immutable, Versioned Map – Mark Volkmann – exploring Mark’s Java Map implementation built on immutable versioned data (as opposed to mutable data ala HashMap or Clojure’s immutable version)
• Erlang OTP – Zac Duncan – OTP is Erlang’s library for building highly resilient server infrastructure

We’ll have talks on two new topics this month:

• Inform 7 – a DSL for Interactive Fiction – Adam Thornton
• Source Code Version Management with Branching & Merging – Stephen Venters

Adam will walk us through a different kind of language than we normally see – Inform 7 is a domain specific language for creating interactive fiction like the classic Zork of old.

Stephen Venters will be talking about version control management, specifically how to work with branching and merging to leverage the full capability of your VCS.

This meeting will be the LAST meeting at Appistry. Appistry has been an eager and amazing host since the very first Lambda Lounge meeting in December 2008. Having them available as a stable home for the Lambda Lounge has been an important part of the group’s success. In particular, I want to thank Michael Groner for his tireless work setting up and tearing down for the meeting at Appistry over the last couple years. In the future we will probably be at the Revelytix offices in Kirkwood but that will be announced for sure before the April meeting.